Over my mattress and my baby blankets, a mobile slowly revolved, drawing a merry-go-round of animal shapes to a jingling nursery tune. Without a word in my head, without names to call my parents, without any capacity to help myself, I lay there, wide-eyed and drooling, watching for the Red Elephant to float by again. And again.
It was hypnotic, mysterious — this parade of pillowed characters in primary colors, drifting around and and around. And every time the Red Elephant came around, with his jolly smile and his dark shiny eyes, I felt a surge of desire and reached with all of my might to grab for it.
When I was old enough to wrap my fingers around crayons, I went for the reds. I scribbled shapes with jolly smiles and dark, shining eyes. I wanted now to go beyond reaching for and seizing the Idea that had triggered something in me. I wanted to become a part of it. I wanted to ponder it through the vigorous act of imitation. By focusing on particular parts — a body, a nose, an eye — I was familiarizing myself with elements that were Important.
There’s something happening here.
* * *
And it’s still happening. It happens to me almost every day.
What is happening when something drifts into view and inspires that rush of adrenalin? I’m not talking about those things that trigger our appetite for food or other primal desires. I’m talking about those things that awaken us from the familiarity of our present experience and focus our concentration, activate the zoom lens of our minds, and inspire us to make something of it.
Our days are full of Red Elephants, if our eyes are open to see them.
Sometimes we respond like a photographer who, walking through her own neighborhood, does a double-take. She looks, and then she looks again at… what? A moment. A scene. A person. An accident. A collision of lines. A contrast of light and shadow. However complex or simple, however large or small, it calls to her. It demands that she do something about it.
With light and chemicals, she reaches out. She casts a net to capture the mystery. Developing the image in her old-fashioned dark room, she makes an equivalent of that dazzling conundrum. That equivalent will allow her to ponder the mystery further, manipulating it until she can consider it clearly.
She may feel compelled to share it, to ask us what we see there. She may keep it to herself — a private and sacred mystery.
This is the artistic impulse. The creative response. The summons of vocation. There’s something happening here. A Red Elephant is standing in our path. We must make something of it. We must name it.
* * *
So we cast our nets. Nets made of words. Nets made of story. Nets made of images and sound.
Some people cast nets to trap others, that they might impress their ideas upon them. They have decided they have answers, and they want to make me agree.
I’m not fond of these folks. They make me feel cornered. They make me look for the exits. They make me want to cross at the corner and walk on the opposite side of the street. When they interrupt a show, I hit “Mute” or change the channel. When I see them coming down the sidewalk, all polished and professional in their suits, carrying their pamphlets and scriptures, I lock the door, turn out the porch light, put down the shades — sometimes I even turn out the lights to make it clear that nobody’s home.
Others cast their nets of word, image, sound, and flavor to capture ideas and then invite us to behold, to question, to contemplate. They capture marvels that cannot be summed up in mere words. They capture questions that open the world. They take something that I mistook as ordinary and dull, and they have shown me something curious, something that makes me look twice.
The art that means most to me has never given me a sense that its maker was eager to please or persuade. Instead, I sense that the artist, too, is completely enthralled — even mystified — by his subject. He’s cast his net, and caught something by the heel — something strange and wild. It is not a puzzle with a solution, nor an image that ever comes fully into focus. It is a parable that provokes both doubt and delight.
One man will stand with a megaphone on a street corner, shouting about the Red Elephant, explaining it to anyone who will listen. And if you sign on the dotted line, he can even tell you how it can be yours.
Another man will stop suddenly on the sidewalk and stare, open-mouthed, up into the sky, whispering, “Can it be?”
One of these two men bothers me. The other guy makes me stop and look up into the sky, awestruck. I probably look like an idiot, but I don’t care. When the Holy Spirit showed up, the disciples started babbling in strange languages. Remember?
I have been taught to behave like the first man. To learn to explain things. To become a salesman disguised as an artist. I want very much to forget those lessons. I want to remember what I was born to be in the presence of mystery. I want to be listening when “the heavens declare” and the day “pours forth speech.” I want to be wide awake when the Red Elephant drifts through the sky.
How about you?
* * *
I can’t explain the stories I write. I don’t understand why I write them at all.
I’ll see dogs fight over a branch — a stick that, for some reason, on the driftwood-strewn shore of Richmond Beach, just down the road from my house, has captured their attention. Suddenly I’ll be moved to write a scene in which two men fight over a treasure.
I’ll be listening to a sermon, wishing for more legroom, my knees pressed against the back of the pew in front of me. Suddenly, Pastor Kelly will share a quote, or deliver an exhortation, and there is something thrilling in the words. A possibility. A question. I forget where I am, forget who’s sitting next to me. Anne, noticing that I’m gripped by some revelation, will squeeze my hand and smile knowingly. Or she, inspired by the same phrase, will put her pen to a blank spot on the church bulletin and compose the rough draft of a poem.
I cast a net of words out across the journal page, or across the gleaming laptop screen. I’ll wander into a dream of uncertainty, scribbling and typing. Something new develops, in which the implications of the dogs’ snarling play, or the pastor’s astonishing words, take on new meaning. At the end of the hour, I might find that my net fell short, that there’s nothing there worth considering. Or I’ll find a scene, a conversation, a few words with flammable chemistry or music that feels good to me. And I’ll want to share them.
“What is going on here?” I’m asking.
That’s what happened during an afternoon hike near Flathead Lake in Montana. I suddenly puzzled over something. And I spent the next fourteen years writing a fairy tale four books long: Auralia’s Colors, Cyndere’s Midnight, Raven’s Ladder, The Ale Boy’s Feast.
This process binds me to the thing that called me. I’ve caught the Red Elephant in my fist, and now I can know its textures, its lines, and tear it apart to see what’s inside. It was just a little pillowed figure after all, felt sewn around some stuffing. It’s just a bunch of words stitched together. But there’s something alive in there, I tell you. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. I’ve spoken with it. When I was a baby and I grabbed hold of that animal, I immediately tried to stuff it into my mouth.
“Eat this book,” the angel told the Apostle John. Mysteries aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be savored, chewed, taken in. “Oh taste and see.” It becomes a part of you. You live with it. It shows up unexpectedly in your dreams.
In his poem “i thank You God for most this amazing day,” e. e. cummings rejoices in the beauty of a sun-saturated day. He celebrates “the leaping greenly spirits of trees.” He has seen something, and he is playing with language, casting his net, trying to catch the glory that has made his heart sing. The poem becomes an equivalent. And he concludes, “now the ears of my ears are awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
Indeed. There is something happening here. Behold.