Page 11 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

shadows and skin, I know only one truth best of all—art is
merely the corpse of a dream.
Art attempts to change the world, enlarge its lonely box of
living and dying. Nothing new can happen here, not yet. The
Deadworld—the solid, banal, and ultimately inferior world
of which we must all take part—would have it no other way.
It is the obligation of every artist—every true artist, that
is—to improve the universe, but because our canvases and
brushes and paints are all dead, we can only outline life in
ashes—never reveal it. My art, even for its vast departures
from convention, is no different. For the first time, however,
I may have stumbled across something that can change all
that.
Not long ago, in the bowels of an abandoned chemical
factory lost to the woods, during a particularly rambling art
tour, my sisters and I were busy unpacking an individual
who had momentarily focused my artistic senses. I was in the
process of coaxing my subject’s bowels to the floor to make
room for the waxen statue that would replace them. The name
of the piece—A View of The Soul, The Curtains Parted. I’d
just pulled the body into the air, using a makeshift complex
of rope and pulley, and was eager to begin molding the wax
figure, a deliberately vague thing intended to demonstrate
the soul’s volatility. But to my surprise, something other
than the traditional fillings of a riven body drifted out, caught
upon a thermal of dead air. It was a piece of yellowed paper,
old and covered in dried blood.
The paper was unremarkable but for five names written
upon it, all of them stacked neatly atop one another—a list.
Strangely, it wasn’t even wet for its placement within the
recently disemboweled body. Apart from its resistance to
blood, there was nothing explicitly unusual about it, yet I
think my life changed the moment I held it, felt the heft of its
mystery. Beneath the list was a promise, as there is beneath
all things—but this one was close to the surface, in no need
of knives to be revealed. All it required was sleep. And so,
14 | Mark Anzalone