The Lion and the Rat by Marc Chagall, 1926
As I wrote in the last post: dreams may force us to contemplate, suddenly awakening us to things we cannot name. A metaphor or symbol or a symbolic work, such as a piece of art or a dream, is a vehicle that can bear a load heavier than our conscious selves are ready to undertake. An example is the Book of Revelation: that poem, dream, and prayer.
Art, poetry and dreams, as with the more enigmatic material of the Bible, lighten our loads. The Book of Revelation has been carrying us for almost two millennia now. Whether we feel disturbed or elated when a creation of gratuitous strangeness and beauty attaches to our psyche, we feel something wonderful drawn from us.
You are entering my dream of the lion here—a dream of one who thought of little else than drawing and painting for many years. Maybe the dream is also a prose poem, or a prayer. The only way to describe the setting of this dream is to do it from the ground up, like a painting. Like something that was made for an inexplicable reason.
It seems it was made on a canvas stretched over wood and brushed with warm “hide glue.” It smells like a rabbit, having come from the cartilage of one, and it dried until taught. Then it was stroked with the silvery lead white paint with the odor as distinctive and earthy as autumn leaves; like butter made by one who discovered the earth and milked her.
The brush loaded with the lead white paint both heightened and smoothed the nubs of the canvas, as if guided by the tender hand of a lover. Then a wash was applied—paint thinned with turpentine—evaporated to leave behind a glow that will illumine from behind the blue sky. Maybe it’s yellow ochre, a color Van Gogh favored as being complementary to blue. Or maybe a transparent crimson, or just the subtle violet tone of the lead white surface itself.
All of that in preparation for the creation of this landscape which is the spectrum of color—a prism of a Northeast autumn.
There are trees against a startlingly blue sky made conscious of their many leaves by their dying, bled of chlorophyll to reveal their true colors. If theses colors were pulverized into pigment and mixed with oil into the paints my own hands have handled, there are cadmiums that are red, yellow and orange; alizarin, rose madder and other crimsons.
There are purples that are impossible to mix from the pigments that the earth, and now laboratories, offer up. These purples must have been teased out of the various refractive properties and combinations of pigment, varnish, and oil: lain across each other and dried, sometimes over and over, to appear in glory.
The prism of the Northeast autumn applied by the unseen hand is trees and sky, also with mountains behind, and a creek in front of them. Complete, the painting jumps into life.
There comes a boat with a man and child inside. I am watching from the bank opposite to the one behind the boat. I see a lion emerge, turn and face me. Every hair from the stubble on his nose to his mane catches the prism of colors and sends them straight to my eyes. He is beautiful. He sees me too, in some way.
The boat floats before him. The man looks curiously at the lion and seems obliged to point him out to the child, as if they are in a zoo. Then the lion bends down and rips away a chunk of the man’s knee, his jaws dripping blood as he uprights himself. The man looks down at his knee, confused.
And thus the dream ends, and here we are. Here I am, confused and affected. With my dream, the choice being mine of how to receive it—as gift or mere muddle, perhaps the after-affect of too much coffee—also comes the choice of whether or not to contemplate it. Is it worth it? Am I worth it?
If I allow that it is worth the time and effort, and if I am able to receive it as a gift from God, I might see my dream as a prayer of my subconscious. Then I might be able to see myself as a creative being by nature, made so by God, before the art school and all else that transpired—as one of many beings made so by God to roam the earth and bristle with creative potential.
Bristling as that lion—perhaps made in His image and fed by the same spiritual milk that fed C.S. Lewis, that great Christian writer and dream-maker who imagined Christ as a lion.
I found early in my life, as I began to study art, that Christ is beautiful. But now it seems to me that believing in Christ at fifteen was like finding Him in a zoo (free admission). I thought there was an entrance and an exit. I was wrong. I did not realize that He roamed free.
No one told me about the story in Genesis of Jacob wrestling the angel and becoming wounded when they asked me if I wanted to become a Christian. (Why have I never heard of this story used as a tool for evangelization?) The Book of Revelation was picked up to put the fear of hell in me. No one told me then what I later learned from an Episcopal priest—that it is a poem for helping the early church cope with persecution.
So we return back to the beginning, but conscious that there are poems and dreams to help us when we realize that we are dealing with more than we bargained for. Thanks be to God.
…..Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals. (Revelation 5:5)
