Homecoming

Once upon a time, a shy girl stole a magazine from art class. That magazine changed her life.

During my adolescence, my relationship with rules was deeply conflicted: one side shy and afraid of being labeled as “bad,” the other side all about rebellion, anger and the breaking of everything. How much I respected your rules depended on how much I liked you – my parents’ rules could fuck themselves but for certain beloved teachers I would penitently honor their every request and limitation.

Such was my 10th grade art teacher, Mrs. M. I really admired and liked her. Her classroom was on the second floor of the high school, a large dusty place, smelling of paint and paper. In the back of the room, in a ragtag cardboard box was a pile of old magazines. Students would use pictures from them for projects. Written in black marker on one flap was:

“Do not take magazines from art room! Thank you!”

I had a study hall in that room and would spend it seated at a square table in the back, next to the windows. This was the “heads” table – the realm of the kids who favored denim and leather jackets. We would work on our drawings and discuss Jethro Tull or Judas Priest. Cigarettes and sometimes other items were exchanged, although I was a silent watcher to those transactions. It was enough that my misfit self could find acceptance at this table.

One day, I selected a copy of American Artist from the magazine box and was idly paging through it while surreptitiously stealing glances at the mulleted boy across from me. He was a guitarist and I had a monstrous crush on him. The sun was streaming in through the windows to my left, golden dust motes dancing in the air. All was quite except the scraping of pencils and another kid’s Walkman at the end of the table, Jethro Tull like always.

I turned the page and was faced with this (click to enlarge):



I forgot all about my mulleted crush. I no longer heard Aqua Lung floating tinnily through the air. For several long breathless moments, there was only me and “Dream Horse.” It was like the world stopped for a moment, an exquisite pause of gleaming white noise.

I turned the page and stopped again.



Where Dream Horse had stunned me, this next image struck me down.

“Priest of Dark Flight.” Rapidly, I scanned the article’s text, looking for an explanation of this god of mine. The figure had been seen by the artist on “an interior journey.” Where, in my head? To this day, there has never been anything that ever reverberated with me more than that first glimpse of the eagle-headed, wooden-armored mythic with hands pressed in unknowable, animistic prayer. It was what I always wanted to draw but could not.

I cut out The Priest, secreted it in my history notebook, and returned the magazine to the box.

Over the course of the following months, I returned to the now mutilated magazine again and again – satisfied with my theft of The Priest but still intrigued by the other drawings. Machine for a Journey of Indeterminate Depth captured me with its obscured face and lion claw hand. Birds made of rotting, wrapped bundles of fabric hinted at journeys through moth-eaten lands where the only sound was the sawing of cellos. And then there was Guardian of the Deepest Gate.



Headless, this shield-carrying centaur thing dwarfed its creator, artist Jos. A. Smith. Joe had been photographed working on the piece, seated on a stool before the eight foot drawing. I’d initially overlooked the photo, so enchanted was I by Dream Horse’s zipper mouth. Now, my eyes kept going back to The Guardian. An unfinished neck drifted into nothing. Wrappings and spiked armor covered a study equine body. My soul vibrated with ache, seeing this image from within me captured on paper by another person. I was both glad and frustrated by it; glad it existed so that I could glory in it, frustrated that my own artistic skills were too undeveloped to produce anything of such blackened majesty.

That June, right before school let out, I stole American Artist, July 1981 from the box in the art room. Sorry, Mrs. M. It had become my Ark of the Covenant.

Throughout the ensuing sixteen years, American Artist, July 1981 remained with me. It endured through countless junk purges and eight moves, a marriage, a divorce, a cross-continental drive. Safe in a plastic sleeve, nestled in various bookcases, it would come out every so often to be worshipped. I had puzzle-pieced it back together, full of regret for cutting out Priest and mangling the fine ink lines of Dream Horse. Occasionally, I would search the Internet for evidence of the artist, looking for more of his work, to learn what had become of him. Nothing. Into the Abyss, from which all these fantastic beings had sprung.

In 2005, sitting on my library floor, I pulled out the magazine once again. It occurred to me that my then-boyfriend might like Machine for a Journey of Indeterminate Depth, as his band focused on similar imagery. He, too, was thunderstruck. In ten minutes he’d found the artist on the Internet. A bitter laugh escaped me – I couldn’t even navigate the Abyss properly to find their creator, let alone draw anything comparable.

It didn’t matter. A message was left on Joe’s voicemail at Pratt, asking for permission to use The Machine. Around two weeks later, Joe called back and said yes. A friendship began.

In May 2006, a package arrived at the door.

“We got something from Joe,” I said, bringing the tube inside. We’d just gotten married and knew he was sending us something, what I had no idea. A roll of paper was inside, protected by tissue. When we pulled an inch of the paper out, I saw a familiar, straight ink line. It can’t be, I thought.

But it was. The Machine. The real Machine, the original.

I leapt away like it would scorch me. There are no words to describe the nameless, elated horror of realizing we’d been entrusted with this priceless work. Penniless backwater little girls don’t grow up to own magical art from a magazine they stole from art class. They just don’t.



That summer we flew to New York City to meet Joe and his wife. It was like we had known them forever. I spent the afternoon in a state of greasy bamboozlement, sitting outside of my body, looking in. Where am I and how did I get here?

The next summer found us heading to Joe’s house in the woods of Pennsylvania. Shrouded in brilliant green trees, the hulking Craftsman was a dappled enigma waiting to be solved by our entry. Again outside my body, I swam through the humid forest air, drifting stunned onto the porch and finally inside. We entered Joe’s cluttered studio. I was terribly curious and wanted to peek through the piles of art but held back, not wanting to be rude. Fifty years worth of creation surrounded us. Drawings were scattered everywhere. Rolls of paper were propped in corners. Several partially finished paintings stood on easles. Somewhere in here are The Priest, The Guardian. Their presence was a sonorous bass tone humming in my bones.

“Do you have Dream Horse?” I asked. I couldn’t bring myself to ask about the other pieces, not just yet.

“That’s been sold,” Joe replied. “I sold that one a long time ago, I don’t remember to who.”

Lost then. Grief.

“Feel free to dig around.” Joe indicated the piles with a wave of his hand. “Have a look. Go ahead!”

We pawed carefully, tentatively. Large drawings balanced on top of playing-card-sized frames crashed around. I found myself automatically neatening and straightening the precious piles, worried for their safety. Joe was unconcerned, knocking things over as he wended through footpaths to show us curios from foreign lands, relics from his meditations and rituals and adventures.

I am good at nothing, I thought.

At some point, Joe began hauling the rolls out of the corners and dragging them onto the porch to display. Birds called, flitting through the dense forest. The air was like a week-old damp washrag draped over my head. Sweat glued my military pants to my thighs. The whole experience was an impromptu sweat lodge.

Joe unrolled; suddenly The Priest of Dark Flight was praying before me.

My first reaction was shock at the size: from the magazine print, I had no sense of scale. The actual drawing was over 5 feet wide. My second reaction was to be stunned by the figure’s black, gleaming eyes which had not translated in the reproduction. This drawing was deep. I teetered on the edge.

“Here, let me get the others.” Joe laid The Priest down on the porch floor where any number of unnameable things could happen to it. We hurriedly rolled it back up.

Guardian of the Deepest Gate unrolled and unrolled and unrolled. Joe had his wife bring him a chair. Standing up on it, he was barely able to get the whole thing out onto the porch. I stood, goggling. It still had no head. I realized the picture in the magazine had been staged; the drawing as photographed in 1981 had been complete, not unfinished like I’d thought. Its headlessness made it more ominous, more unexplainable. Joe told us its story, how he encountered it during a meditation, how it had been screaming, denying entry to its realm, a figure of incredible power and danger. “I’ve told some shamans about this,” he said. “They told me never to go back to this place without someone else with me. It’s too dangerous, otherwise.”

Guardian became ours that day. It watches over us in our living room. I talk to it often, maybe for my own reassurance that I won't come out of the bedroom some night and discover it standing free, all ahowl, stinking like brimstone and anise while my house starts to smolder around it.



I've been waiting to redo my library for years. Something has made me wait, a sense of incompleteness. Something missing. Don't bother.

About a year ago, I started to know what was missing. Three months later, I realized that missing piece of puzzle was within my grasp. A few weeks after that, I made a choice that was both monumental and simple and completely incomprehensible to the shy little girl who lives within me.

June 2010 found me walking alone through the streets of New York City, no longer outside of my body like when we met Joe for lunch but fully aware and unafraid. In my pocket was a check. We hopped a bus to Pennsylvania the next day and made our way again to the Craftsman in the woods. The next afternoon, I shyly regarded The Priest where it had been unrolled at my feet, contemplating those endless black eyes that had always looked into my soul, saying “I know you.”

I wrote the check that night before I could chicken out.

Then, thunderbolt.

Joe said, “So the fellow who bought Dream Horse contacted me. He’s retiring and wants to sell it.”

I did some math in my head quickly, then decided it didn’t matter. If I were on my deathbed, would I regret not taking this chance to capture the last of my beloved images from American Artist, July 1981? Yes, I would. I would lie there, dying, cursing myself for being a poor kid who thought it was better to have money in the bank than something which resonated so hard with your soul that it made you forget to breathe.

As I write this, Dream Horse is to my right, stepping high on his 70s fabric landscape, his zipper mouth grimacing with cryptic equine wisdom. The Priest is directly in front of me; enormous, ancient. I prayed to it tonight, this god of mine, this thing that has always been my god. It’s the thing in my heart that bore me through five thousand terrified nights and days of childhood, the thing which burns in me on stage, the thing which flows through me like a relentless, rust-colored river and gives me strength to go on when the tired child in me wants nothing more than to lay down and just stop.

The journey started on that sunny day in 1986 is now complete. There is a wholeness in me I have never felt before, a wholeness long needed, long sought. I will say this only once on this blog – I am blessed to be surrounded by these soul dreams. They are dark and complex and beautiful and I choke up almost daily when I see them. Their energy fills me, giving me the strength to begin a new journey which has been a long time coming.

I listened to my heart on that day in the classroom, where I broke the rules and stole the magazine. Would that we could hear so clearly all the time - our dreams would come to us like old friends, and we would find ourselves healed.