Palingenesis  (presented with Palingenesis exhibit, GearBox Gallery, 10/16

 

When men first walked in the world

A dire place it was, and cursed,

A battleground between two great  forces, like gods they were,

Each the other's antithesis,

Existing eternally, without mercy, compassion or care

But for each to extend the power of its own essence over all existence.

 

One realm flowed and burned like fire; unstable and ever changing.

In all that place, in all of time, the same thing never happened twice.

The other was a place of frozen rigidity, hard and crystalline,

Where changes spiraled back to their own beginnings, endlessly repeating.  

 

The suffering of the people was great, racked between titanic tides,

But among them, one man, a great hero, gave them hope

Defending the people with strength and determination.

For an eon he waged great battles, winning them all, 

But each victory seemed to be the genesis of  a new conflagration;

Every triumph served only to throw fuel on the greater conflict.  

 

Understanding that he must find a new way to help his people

Hero girded his loins and set off on three great quests,

Epic journeys below the earth, through the seas and finally beyond the sky itself,

Seeking wisdom deep enough to finally end the strife.

 

At the end of  his final quest Hero achieved an overwhelming realization,

That as terrible as it was, the conflict of the gods was the natural state of the world,

Treating it as a war he could fight but never win made the  suffering worse.

 

Liberated now and embracing the truth, he rose into the vast dark void between the gods,

And shouting loudly to the opposing forces he offered the sacrifice of his own life

To whichever god would withdraw and leave the people in peace.

 

Hero was such an irresistible offering that each god blazed forth in furious lust,

Reaching out with full unrestrained power to claim him.

But their power, combining and building on itself, was so great that the universe exploded,

Ripped to splinters, and the gods were thrown into dark places beyond, never to return.

 

Annihilated, the world spun in darkness, without form,

Until a single spark of light appeared, the spark of Hero's spirit,

And it spread until it filled all of the remaining time and space.   

And the shards of the universe coalesced around the light,

Transforming into a new world; a world in balance.

And the people began their lives again.

 

 

David Fitzgerald     10/2016

 

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Tom's Story (presented with Blood Net - 2004)

Forty years ago this summer, this month, I was seventeen, and on a group bicycle tour in Europe. A couple of weeks into the trip, when we were in Oslo, Norway, five of us were riding along a city street toward the train station. Tom, who was riding behind me, fell off his bike into the path of a bus. It ran over him and he was killed instantly.
 
An ambulance came very quickly and took poor Tom away. The rest of us were told to wait at the scene until the police investigator could come to take our statements, so we stood there on the sidewalk silently, each left to his own thoughts. I was seventeen and had never experienced anything like this before. I had no idea what to do except wait for what came next. 
 
It was a dark, damp morning. It had been raining earlier and the sky was still heavily overcast; the color of  lead. Grey light shown grimly on the old grey buildings all around us. The street was made of little square granite paving stones with flat irregular tops. The day felt as dismal as my mood. The only spot of color and brightness amoung all this drepressing grey was a big pool of  blood spread out across the street; all that was left of our friend Tom.
 
I never imagined how much blood would come from one body; it covered an area the size of Tom’s whole body. The pool was solid red in the center but out on the edges it began to follow the squared off contours of the paving stones. It filled into the lower stones but flowed around the higher ones, making a checkerboard design. In some places it followed the cracks between the stones creating thin zigzagging lines leading from square to square.
 
I was amazed how fresh and vibrant the blood looked; shiny and slick. Its color was deep and intense and of course the cool grey tones all around highlighted it beautifully, making it seem brighter and richer. I kept expecting it to congeal and turn more of a brown but it didn’t.  I could see it was thickening a bit because the breeze, blowing now and then across the surface of the blood, built turgid little waves that flattened out very slowly.
 
I stood and stared at that pool of blood for a long time, fascinated. I remember thinking that I would never in my life forget its sheer visual impact; its color, its shiny surface, the pattern it made there among the stones. I was sure that someday I would capture that scene in some kind of art, though I had never really done any real art at that point in my life. I wondered how I would do it.
 
After a while a workman came and spread sand on the blood. He shoveled the sand into a wheelbarrel and took it away, as they had with the rest of Tom. The police came and asked their questions. They didn’t speak much English so it was sort of an interesting challenge to talk to them. It didn’t seem right for the group to go on, but there was nothing else we could do. That evening we left on a train for Sweden. I’ve haven’t been back to Oslo since.
 
On Seeing Red  Dave Fitzgerald   July 1, 2004