Axiomatic, Andrei Rublev invented light:
the wound & the eye are one. Like eyes after sleep, the wound
gently opens. Like eyesight resisting focus, the wound
glazes over. Like the fluid in the eyesac, the wound
is rich with salt. As the sea invokes a massive
innerness; as the deserts were once the depths of the sea;
the wound is traversed, moved through. Loathed & praised.
It is easy
to loathe the wound. What are its praises? Andrei Rublev
imagined them as darkness once covered the earth, poured
from the sky. But only in this depth could Andrei Rublev
have seen the one whose image is hidden by his light.
A light not of darkness but of Consummation. Its
inluminous glare. My soul is this darkness, he thought.
My soul is where the light roils. This image of the soul
& God conjoined Andrei Rublev dreamed. Saw together.
Spoken to him in an innermost place. Stuttered with
a pulsation at his fingertips. A texture of chalk
God sheds like skin. Likewise simplicity makes me nearer
to God, he thought.
Mirror of incomprehensible light bent
on itself.
He holds the icon in his eye. He lathers each icon with
a chrism of gnosis. The eyesight of insight. Anoint,
oil, heal with fire, with an ash of gold. Alluminor,
master of Dominations & Archangels. What I see,
I watch consumed; burned complete into light. Whoever sees
nothing in his prayer sees God. The Jesus Prayer was
his practice as monk, hesychast, & iconographer.
He counted time by the brief intaken breath &
the deliberate, laborious contrition of
breathing out. He looked for nothing in the light. In what way
did he syncopate brushstroke & breath pause? How did his
fingers twitch in the small labor of prayer?
Officiants
with the soft pursed lips of lambs nuzzle at the liturgical
rectitudes.
O, mirror of incomprehensible light
bent on itself.
Andrei Rublev counted the droplets of
morning light as if ducats of some treasure; but no —: gold
in its apocalypse will also be consumed. Light shorn.
The Voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire.
The Voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness. Do you have
a live coal? he thought, to himself, to no one. He thought
of the coal on his tongue, sizzling there, binding its meat to
his voice. The planets slung in their swinging, hinged in
blotted light. Scattered lightning, off, elsewhere. He thought of his
heart which had stopped beating. He thought of the blood & the last
sounds of that inner tide. He thought of the fingertips that
held the brush flecked with gold that fluttered there. The moon bunched
its muscles & sagged. The night drooped like a splendid velvet
dropcloth. The burning coal fizzled out, a candy now
glazed with syllables of prayer. He painted the iris of
the Savior, its nacred motes. What wretched mortal makes this
Image?
Mirror of incomprehensible light bent
on itself.
God hauled him to the floor, stooped over him. Pride
hit like sunlight then fratricide. He harvested no blood
but sniffed at the whitewash. The Seraph of a sparkled
arcade stood up on Andrei Rublev’s tongue, glossed it with
euphemisms & sheened the firework of his new scar,
announcing: Behold the wounds you stoked, & was reabsorbed
into the sphere of fire, fevered & serpentine in its
egress.
Andrei Rublev clutched his throat & wept; kept painting
the icons of the Church of the Dormition. You enter
an icon as you would enter a cave, he thought. Even
an icon can have a cave-in.
The lost mirror of
unattainable light bent on itself.
The life of hands,
the tilted heads of the sainted, the gesture of hands
held aloft… Everywhere I see a secret fear of death
in the way men seek to escape loneliness. He absorbed
the vinegar his brushes soaked in with a sponge, held it to
his tongue. I thirst, he quoted. I have thirsted. Solitude
has an action; it expands like light into an hour;
or the mind. But leaved in gold, layered & fibered.
Within
him a small murmuring stream of fire cleaved an embankment
of prayer. It was his breathing: huffed sadness. The Greek taught him
to pray. Theophanes the Greek, in exile.
Who knew the world
could age? Theophanes taught him lunation of the light
in paint; the visage of a saint, the forms of the Masters
of Crete. He taught him privacy of the image; taught him
the image that stands for sorrow, for heart-sickness, wordless;
to make icons only in strictest quietude, such that each
icon instructs as prayer merely in the burnish of its
brushstrokes. An icon works as an incantation; stick close
to your icon as if to breathing. What else had
Theophanes taught him? He showed light as if through the blown
glass of a halo. Blurred copper light; light of vividest
gold.
O mirror of bending but always imperceptible
light,
withdraw from all the extern—: point inwards wholly. No
leaning to the outer. God — we read — is outside of none,
present but never-conceived to all in this multiple
communion. This thought is rest; this thought is the end of
singing
ill. Lift this choral songful to God.
Lift; lift & lift.
Andrei Rublev looked through the high nave window of
the Cathedral of the Dormition where night had
descended. And he thought: Under the other side of
heaven a window flumes with light past the prototype it
represents. Saints swarm in the frame of light — an icon — which
is a crown, scattered with omnipresent lightning, scorching
the air. This crown adorns an angelic cataract,
current of my solitude, where the Lord is known in
privacy. What bird symbolizes the sheer force of such
heat? The eye is a glass fire & I am the chiro-
technician. My diet consists of a glass of tea, bread,
sometimes an egg. The crown is utterly interior
& spangled. The radiant circumference of heaven is
nested with phosphor. My hands are filled with heat & the sky
is the lozenge shape so loved by Theophanes; each
icon fuels the hyaline furnace the eye lights.
Mirror of inapprehensible light bent in on itself.
Apocalyptic blooms of gold gorge themselves on light riots,
on Thrones of the upsurge.
The strength of the thought was lost.
Some placid gasp. His teeth throbbed where his sinuses ulcered
with fumes. Andrei Rublev uttered yet further silence
into the tapered light. Smell of beeswax, rancor of paints.
Mucussy ligament under the skin of the Lord.
Blessing of tinctures. Massive vocation of the image,
the bidden Word. The glossy title. The loved, wondered Name.
Andrei Rublev never saw the sea. His sense of light was
not a sea-light; it was the sky-light of daytime, what the
sun burned through westward into the steppe, the vast grasses.
Expansion spread upward on its itinerary; light
plummeted from heaven, accipitrine & dexterous, a
flexed muscle.
O mirror of unstable light bending ever inward.
Inadequacy hovered like dragonflies, hummed. His eyesight
splintered, drifted honeycombs & hexagrams across the
primed church walls. He felt that solitude, that massive confrontational
loneliness, heave in him; resorted then to the Jesus
Prayer. Plied on with his work. Rhythmical piety; horded
plenitude of utterance.
Daniil the Black scowled. No —
he looked sad. No — he found beatitude. No — Andrei
Rublev is the Saint. He helped paint the Church of the Dormition.
He wrote the icons Andrei Rublev drew out with his hands.
Daniil the Black announced the tone of an athumia—:
that privacy, which consumes the soul in spite of splendor
or a light of grace.
What was this land that they had crossed for
the sake of glorifying God? What mirrors the
incomprehensible light from above?
What distinguishes men
from the angels is that he is made of image.
Incarnated, wrought, enjoined. What is pure spirit becomes
a spoken thing & penetrates what nature in its life-
giving energies perpetuates.
The simple gesture
toward sanctification. Three tones brought together; the
isotone in dominant light. Not harmony, not
augmentation — the splendid homousia —:
consubstantiation. Andrei Rublev sighed. He could not
impress his mind with this thought. He spat in his hands, warmed them
by rubbing them. Light was tinge. And the tinge was prismatic,
holy. He adored the light & painted, caved in blinding gold.
• • •