1000 Words: Michael Newberry's "Hymn To The Sun"

Prose to the Painting.

Michael Newberry’s “Hymn To The Sun”. With Astrophoto reference by Tomas Dobrovodsky

What spirit, what angst, what joy, what life, what death, what vision is conjured up in the frozen lake that is our infinite marbled cosmos? Marbled by far flung shifting tides, unknown substances, universal myths, charcoal like debris? Should we even call it ours, this thrusting, bulging, growing expanse? Does it belong to us, or we, to it?

Perhaps ownership is a vulgar way of putting it. Are we not part of the cosmos? Inside it, within it? When you reach out your hand, youthful or elderly, with a fist of rage or a summoning gesture, are you not touching the very nature of it? Like an unborn child may wish to grab towards the inside of the womb?

We are desperate for answers, for explanations of our existence, our destiny, our source! It is a riddle with no clear solution, a lock with no key, an enigma with little light to offer us illumination.

And how many ways are left to describe the stars? Are they holes punched through the black tarp, letting in a silvery shimmer? Are they the scattered remains of broken hearts, breathless and pleading? Are they studded diamonds, patient, stoic, wise and aged?

Are they bombastic, filled with youthful angst, ready to blow? By the millions they fall–almost foolish to give them names! Connecting them with lines, we could conjure any picture imaginable. In the countryside, we count them. In the city, we have blasted them away with the starving lights of infinite commerce.

When speaking about mysteries and answers, I think too, on the ritual. I conjure wild, rhythmic dancing, barbaric hollering, faces stained with paint, unabated, random lovemaking.

And we may think of some far off, isolated tribe from the African continent, but I prefer to think of those acts still being done today, in the hot clubs of Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago. We are beasts with an internal tempo. If I had to guess, I would say that it is a hot one.

Is the ritual, the hymn, the ode, the song—aren’t these codes our closest to any possible answer that we have? The question is the answer, the response is the call. We give ourselves over to humor when we are at our best! “Knock-knock” we say to the expanse! Well, go on and say, ask of us “Who is there?!”

Akhenaten. Nefertiti. Sol. Ra!

Ra—with his Peregrine Falcon head, the sun disk wrapped with a cobra, his chariot driven by fire, carrying the source of all warmth, all light, all growth, all spirited gusto in his hands. In his hands—the hands that hold the ropes of the chariot!

But who could give credit to the sun? Who could produce a deed of proper ownership? So, of course, we dance. We do the jitterbug rag, the foxtrot, the cha cha cha. We tango and waltz, suspended in Sagan’s sunbeam, hopping one and two and three and four, like the staccato notes on a never-ending staff. Yes, we tap dance the staccato, rave to the arpeggio, raise the mystery of movement and grace with flailing arms and combustible legs, exploding hearts.

We are foolish, primal subjects. We are prone to bitterness, rage, envy, the fear of the dark, the fear of one another, the fear that is truly ourselves! Even, the fear of a new dance craze that summons the youth in deep, sexual antagonism. We have no fear of being alone in the dark, but the fear that we are not.

And who should we elect, if one could put it in such a dumb, bureaucratic way, to hold the sun for a moment? What bodily form is taken shape as the one who should greet the sole source of moral illumination, earthly fertility? Should we need an entity to hold up the sun, to put forth the case for our humanly existence? Should we need any defense—the rapists, conmen, murderers, bastards that we humans often are? Should we need a grand interpreter to put up our case?

Are we pleading with the sun in gratitude, or for forgiveness? Do we receive its daily gifts as if they were granted, as if they were absolute, as if they were automatic? Do we fear, when the last lip, its last rays dip beneath the horizon line, forcing ourselves to take in the night, to dance in the dark, to imbibe until unconscious, do we then fear that it is the last we will see of Akhenaten? Of Sol? Of Ra, with his fiery chariot, zipping through nebulas, star clusters, passing by unknown planets, and yet to be named celestial phenomena?

And surely, if we could elect such an observer, a diplomat, it would be no man, the crook that he is! But a mother, of sorts. A mother of nature, a dancer and interpreter of grace!

It could be that poet Anne Sexton of Massachusetts or Sylvia Plath from the same. Haven’t they contained in themselves passionate, masterful interpreters of the ceaseless humanitarian confession? The handmade scars of earthly existence, the death-wish that is all but human and humanity’s alone?

Oh, never mind. It could just as well be a woman from Idyllwild, once a flower child, with dirt on her knees, and feet, mud covered from the river, a handful of wild strawberries, a daisy behind her ear! An offering to what the sun has created!

I am sure it could be done. A hymn of humanity. It would bear the confessional spirit, all decay and vice, all growth and virtue. Within it, all things are contained. It would be a woman to symbolize us at our best! Her graceful curvatures, her nurturing breasts, her bare feet, sturdy and poised. Cupping the sun, she reaches out in ancient wisdom. She can look the sun in the eye. She can suspend it in her transparent hands, enchanted eyes. Yes, she can sing to it a hymn for all of us—surely one our loving sun can understand.

JSV,

2024

Michael Newberry

is on substack. He is the author of “The Shrewd Artist” newsletter, has exhibited worldwide, and is the author of a number of books on art, painting and the artist’s life.

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