Why I Create
Maggie Morton, Sanctuary, digital painting
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
- C.S. Lewis
The living room of my first childhood home had rich, red carpet that traveled all the way up the stairs to the second story. I descended that red staircase every day, but one time in particular has soaked into my memory.
The long weave was yielding to my bare, five-year-old feet, hugging my toes with each step, until a little more than halfway to the first floor, it wasn’t anymore. I looked down to see what felt so smooth beneath my right foot: A green paper ornament, cut from a cereal box the morning before. It was nothing but a childish decoration looking up with a cartoon face, yet suddenly the carpet was blushing so bright against its chartreuse ink, its fiber so plush beside the slickness of the paper, that my sole stilled above it, trying to memorize its sensation. In an act of will, my mind whispered “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.”
Why have I held on to that seemingly inconsequential moment in achingly banal detail, yet I can’t recall the last time I descended that red-carpeted staircase, the day my mom took my sister and I across state lines. Was I carrying a suitcase? My favorite stuffed dalmatian? Nothing at all? Maybe it’s because in that moment, with that ornament, I tapped into something that transcended every instant of upheaval and uncertainty—one chosen signpost among many that hangs on a thread I cling to through time, even into the future.
As a teenager the feeling came in the form of song. I was fourteen, getting dressed to the sounds of the radio when I first heard it. The gently plucked opening notes rang out crisp, dancing into the air like the bells of a steeple calling me to worship. My whole life I had gone to church, sang with my whole voice and prayed with my whole body, but when the singer’s melody wove into the echo of the guitar, telling a story of insatiable longing—my story—it was as though I had never worshipped before.
My bedroom became a chapel, the music a hymn. Instead of standing before an altar, I lied down, face to the ceiling, to the sky, to God, my body sinking into the embrace of my hot pink shag rug while my mind ascended on the scale of the guitar like a stairway to heaven. I asked for a guitar for my next birthday, but I never learned to make it resonate quite like my sister’s little black radio.
At sixteen, I spotted it on the side of the highway. Factory spires studded with white lights illuminating the steam as it twisted up into the night. This time I had a camera, and I was determined to catch it on film. I lifted the familiar weight of my weapon, brought it before my eager eye, centered the great beast in its minuscule frame, flexed my fingers until its distant, nebulous form came into focus, and fired a single shot into the night. Beneath the red light of my high school’s dark room I examined the evidence. A miss.
In college, I found a suitable name for it: The Sublime. With that word like a spade in my hand, I excavated a long history of artists that sought before me to pay homage to their own encounters with heightened reality. Those moments where the self expands until it falls away, while at the same time shrinking before the enormity of some power beyond its control—call it death or eternity or God.
I stained canvases with the hope of recognizing some truth in a field of color and form. Feeble attempts to immortalize the moments that arrested my entire being. For a time I sought solace in irony. I painted idyllic landscapes then tore holes through them—borrowed figures from the romantic canon and marooned them in landscapes of empty canvas. But embracing cynicism was its own defeat. A dishonest resignation that beauty and sentiment are mere tools of propaganda rather than reflections of our deepest longings, and therefore our truest nature.
I once believed I would one day find the valve to release this reservoir—ensnare my quarry in shallower waters—but still it surges within me, rises to meet the beckoning of my senses. Something beautiful and terrible and magnificent—a white whale emerging from unknowable depths, breaking a surface as smooth as taught canvas. I raise the brush, the stylus, the pen—a spear aiming to pierce thick hide. I have used every vocabulary I know to craft my testimony and found every syllable insufficient.
All that paints the canvas now is the shadow of the curtain shifting across its white expanse. I shift with it, uncertain. I hesitate, knowing the space will never be fuller than in its emptiness. I see in its hard stare the weight of so many moments that came before, pressing against the picture plane—a staircase draped in scarlet, an arpeggio twinkling like dust in the afternoon light, factory spires at highway speed—each one desperate to be made manifest.
I cling with a vice grip to every flash of burning clarity, of vision, of seeing beyond myself and inside myself all at once, but when I open my fists, hoping to examine the very nature of flame, its ashes in my hand. So I can do no more than open my palms upward, ready to cradle sifted blessings, not the thing itself, but the assurance that it’s still alight, somewhere out of reach.
