What is Left
(click image to enlarge)
Irene Delka McCray

“Can a person become an epiphany? Can we entertain the idea that all along our earthly life has been phenomenal, a showing, a presentation? Can we imagine that at the essence of human being is an insistence upon being witnessed – by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself – and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display. The image will out, and the last years put the finish to the image.

It is then only natural that we become more like apparitions, already sepulchral effigies, stand-ins for ancestors. Visits to us become ceremonies; gifts, offerings; conversations, liturgical repetitions. We are left as traces, lasting in our very thinness like the scarcely visible lines on a Chinese silkscreen, microlayers of pigment and carbon, which can yet portray the substantial profundities of a face. Lasting no longer than a melody, a unique composition of disharmonious notes, yet echoing long after we are gone. This is the thinness of our aesthetic reality, this old, very dear image that is left and lasts.”

James Hillman, from The Force of Character and the Lasting Life