Resurrection One

Yesterday, was happy to chew into a lot of work - sketched a full composition (barring two insets) on the sunny roof at he studio, and worked on some font stuff.

Easter approaches, and I’ve been meaning to develop some ideas on stories of resurrection. In an early draft of the ‘Baldr’ story I’m working on, the epilogue, based on the old norse poems, ends with resurrection in a reborn world. Telling this story to people, I often saw the light in  people’s eyes diminish at this point. “Oh, it’s a Jesus story.” No. No no no.

But then, what is Resurrection? What is it doing int his story?

I realized I was working with some poetic/mythic ideas I thought were self-evident as clearly artificial, clearly metaphorical. (This is tendency that, for myself-as-storyteller, I need to get offer. If I want to mystic, that’s fine).

So I’ve since been *translating* ‘resurrection’ in to more psychological, more dramatic, more human terms. I want to put to paper some interpretations of Resurrection.

::1:: Literal, way back, plants and the world coming back to life.

::2:: Literal - religious, bodily

::3:: Literal - Spiritual, Reincarnation.

These are the religious iterations. Quite literal. But the next ones are my own, idiosyncratic ferrying over meaning into the metaphoric and psychological realm.

::4:: A renewed sense of life in the griever, achieved through the soul’s image of the deceased. In this way, the dead person’s form creates new (quality of) life.

::5:: Again, with the image of the deceased in the mourner’s psyche, the mourner now takes their own love for the particularness of the deceased and projects it onto others. Experiences with death can bring us down to our common humanity; anyone who has grieved a terrible loss can empathize with someone else undergoing the same. In this way, the beloved who has died has come back as all humanity.

4 and 5 are elements I’m building my Baldr story around - gone is the magic of confusion of resurrection. In this way, a mythic story and holiday like Easter, for me, touches both 4 and 5. Through the suffering and loss of a single person we care about, we gain a more expansive love for the world. And if this love is not more general, it will be more facile, readier to jump the boundaries of difference into the realm of sympathy. Nothing seems to be a greater unifier to people than common suffering, and the story of the Passion of the Christ mythologizes this - an innocent person suffering to death.

Morbid thoughts on a rainy day. I’m sure I’ll keep working on this one.