A winged thing rises from the meeting place of water and air, half dolphin and half something older than taxonomy permits. Its body carries the cool sheen of pearl and amethyst; trailing fins dissolve into ribbons that read at once as fin and as feather, while a banner of refracted color crosses the upper register and cumulus piles rose and silver against a sky that has not decided whether it is morning or the inside of a dream. Celestial Dream takes for its subject the simplest of impossible propositions, that a creature of the sea might be granted the freedom of the heavens, and asks the viewer to consider why such an image feels less like invention than like recollection.
The dream has its precedent in fact. The great swimmers of our own world were once walkers; the ancestors of whales and dolphins left the land near fifty million years ago and went down into the water, trading limbs for flukes and the open breath for the long patience of the dive. To grant one of them wings, then, is merely to reverse a second time the direction of an ancient migration, to imagine the sea sending an envoy upward as it once received one from the shore. Myth has always treated the boundary between the elements as a membrane rather than a wall, and the canvas honors that older intuition.
Stranger still, the dolphin holds a genuine and documented place in the human search for company among the stars. In the autumn of 1961 ten scientists gathered, quietly and at some risk to their reputations, at the radio observatory at Green Bank in West Virginia, to ask in earnest whether anyone might be listening from beyond the solar system. Among them sat the young Carl Sagan and the astronomer Frank Drake, who scratched out during those days the famous equation that still bears his name and still frames every reckoning of how many speaking worlds the galaxy might hold. Present also was John C. Lilly, whose studies of dolphin communication so impressed the company that they styled themselves the Order of the Dolphin. The reasoning was elegant. A mind that had evolved in the sea, alien to us in nearly every particular and yet plainly intelligent, was the nearest rehearsal available for the far harder conversation that science hoped one day to hold with a mind from another star.
There is a poetry in the parallel that the founders of that search felt before they could prove it. A dolphin moves through a dark and crowded medium by casting sound into it and reading the echoes that return, assembling a picture of the world from the discipline of listening. The radio astronomer does very nearly the same, sweeping the silence across frequency after frequency in the hope that one narrow band will carry a voice. The bright arc that crosses Celestial Dream is itself a lesson in that same grammar, for a rainbow is only the slender visible portion of a far wider spectrum, and the cosmos speaks chiefly in colors our eyes were never built to perceive, in radio and infrared and the high registers of X-ray and gamma. The painting hangs its creature upon the one ribbon of that spectrum we are permitted to behold.
The deepest resonance, though, lies beneath ice rather than above cloud. The likeliest harbors for life beyond the Earth, by the present reckoning of planetary science, may be no sunlit worlds at all; they may be the dark interior seas of frozen moons. Jupiter’s moon Europa conceals beneath its cracked shell a global ocean thought to hold more water than all the seas of Earth combined, and Saturn’s small moon Enceladus flings into space, through fissures near its southern pole, plumes salted with organic compounds and the chemical makings of metabolism. If anything swims in those hidden waters, it does so beneath a roof of ice, under a sky it can never rise to meet. Celestial Dream may be read, by anyone so inclined, as the wish of such a creature made visible, the longing of the sealed ocean to know the open air.
Carl Sagan, who had sat among the Order of the Dolphin as a young man, would later describe the whole of space as a cosmic ocean and our first ventures into it as the cautious wading of a creature that has known only a single shore. We are ourselves the dreaming sea-thing of the canvas, bound to one blue world and gazing upward at a vastness we have only lately begun to swim. The same question moves beneath a good deal of the work gathered among my collected paintings. Moonreach sets a full moon within a serpentine world-tree under the old hermetic rule of as above, so below; the Mermaid Mashup asks why the forms of the sea and our own should be thought separate at all. The thread holds constant throughout, whether the dark overhead is empty, or whether it has merely been waiting.
Celestial Dream offers no argument and demands no creed. It sets a luminous improbability before the eye and lets the mind follow it where it will, toward the evolution of swimming things, toward the solemn first meeting of the scientists who hoped to overhear the cosmos, toward the buried oceans of distant moons and the patient question they keep. The void was never empty.
Acrylic on canvas, 18×24.
