Critique #1

“Oh, yes.” I whisper to the mirror as I turn on the spiraled lamp resting on my vanity. “I’m here for the critique.”

Let’s begin.

———

It is through the lens of Destructive Vision that this Reconfigured Angel is released from the marble, a birth of The Whole which rises as Pieces are chiseled away. This, a birth from imaginative facilities at the hands of perceived destruction, completed in service of co-creation.

Grind me down and allow the weathered veneer to crumble. Make it slow as I rotate, tumble, and, by your hand, am smoothed. Watch as the muted dust begins to pulse and glisten.

I ask you to meditate on the process of sculpting from block; it is absence that makes the whole and the whole that highlights the missing. Those chiseled spots and dust that find themselves on the studio floor, swept into a meticulous pile? That Angelic masterpiece? Well—

He pops the top of a Coke and I pipe in “here, let me pour.” I conjure a volcanic fizzling and bubbling river, cresting the lip of the glass and He, wide-eyed, gasps. I pour steadily to the edge, threatening overflow, but somehow not quite. A precise, pre-meditated pour to elicit an anticipated reaction.

A little dribble of that elixir here and a dash more there transforms me from dust to Angel before His eyes. It is the answer to my little prayer “Devour me. Let me fling myself from the Cosmic Laboratory into the Abyss of Possibilities and chart for Future descents the tales of my way back—which is to say forward and to the side.”

Trust that time and again as this beauty cycles, it returns, a beauty which cannot be squelched. It is through Strength that with each descent I make I circle back to rise as lovely, if not more, than the last.

So, please. Hold me down. Light the fire of destruction and watch as I stand unflinching, hands restrained, darkness swelling, and the ground churning.

As a tumultuous wind blows open the studio doors, He grabs my arm and pulls me into the cyclone.

“Let me show you,” He says “let me show you what it’s all for. And believe me, it’s something. It is from dust that stone is born.

and so on.”