By LW Leonard
Excerpt of Fiery World
After a few years, a seed and then a seedling and finally a sapling rose from Alice’s ashes. I waited each year for the bud to come and then bloom. And it was not a flame tree, with its fiery leaves, but a cherry tree, small with red twigs and in the summer cherries the red of toy soldiers and flowers of white. I ate a cherry each year and each year it was sour and pulpy, its skin hard and thin. Each year I planted one in our backyard which was wild with blueberry bushes and pale blue forget-me-nots overgrown and tangled. We had stopped tending the garden. To tend was to care and mother preferred the lawn unruly, the flowers blown.
My father sent postcards from his work and travels. He sent a drawing of the bird of paradise from South Africa and orchids from New Zealand, with a description of what was special about the flower and what it meant in the language of flowers. He sent a photograph he took in Japan of a bleeding heart that grew only there and only in the shade. Each petal was in the shape of a heart at rest.
He had left behind his favorite book which was The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in an old edition with soft dark leather and colored drawings. It was about living, he said, with verses about flowers growing from the graves of the dead.
.....
We strolled south of the dove trees to a spot overlooking Trott Lake .
“I think it might be quite beautiful to turn into a tree. People do – in stories, I collect them.”
“I heard that,” Acheron said, looking down at the water. “Which is your favorite?”
“Well, there is Daphne who was loved by Apollo but she didn’t love him, so she was turned into a laurel tree.”
“Since you can never be my bride/ My tree at least you’ll be," he said – that was Ovid. He knew everything that would please me. “What other stories do you like?” he asked.
"Clytie, who loved Apollo so she stared at him all day as he crossed the sky in his chariot and her face was turned into a sunflower."
“Do you think death might be better than life?”
“Being a tree might.”
“Those I meet are always half in love with death.”
North of the fruticetum on the lawn of the lilac the hillside dropped steeply to the lakes. But on the other side it sloped into a gentle valley where a zoo had once been. It was for hoofed animals such as donkeys and horses and they had roamed in the trough the glaciers left behind. We settled on the top of the slope in the center where the lilac bushes were in purple bloom.
It seemed to me that the park was full of ghosts; it was sublime and touched the sky. I sat beside Acheron who lay on his side. He liked my book very much. I had an impressive number of stories, and beautiful drawings, and a nymph for almost every letter of the alphabet. But I was missing someone important, he said.
“Am I? Who? ”
He smiled. “It is always the closest to us that we miss.”
He reached out a pale hand to the nearest lilac bush and lightly broke off a sprig,which he tossed to me. Its small inky purple flowers crumbled into rough powder in my fingers.
“Now that the lilacs are in bloom… do you know this poem?"
I shook my head.
"Its author becomes truly furious when quoted without direct consultation so I shall paraphrase – a crime against poets – but I don't care to seek him out.. He and his ilk were terribly affected by war and the coming of the 'modern' world, as if all worlds are not modern to those in them. The person holding the lilac is the lilac, is spring, is all that life is."
“And you mean that for me?”
“You are its hands, you are its touch.”
He took a slat of wood from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. It was a miniature portrait of me – a girl with light hair and dark eyes.
“Syringa, Lady of the Lilacs,” he said.
“But this is me.”
“Exactly – and such is the way that you yourself missed it….”
“But what does she mean in the language of flowers?”
“Syringa is what you are: early love and early mourning, a cousin of mine…"
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
Just as with The Creative Process, this work celebrates and draws together different art forms and creators. It draws on art for direction and understanding. Besides Ovid and The Rubaiyat and a strong serving of the Gods and spirits of Hades, it offers up T.S. Eliot, Forrest Gander, Thomas Chatterton, Dante. It uses myth, with stories of creatures turned into trees and the language of flowers. It presents the artists Rembrandt and Frans Hals. And it makes of the past a new creation.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
Mia Funk and I talked often about Fiery World and how art and nature provide and express the beauty and pain of our lives. Mia's misty layered paintings often share the same expression of the mysterious oblique. Also, I drew on art in its many forms to create something new, a capability humanity has only just begun to explore fully.
LW Leonard was born in New Zealand, grew up in Manhattan and now lives in Hawaii. She won the James Jones First Novel Award for her novel Since You Ask (Akashic Books, New York, Stolista Press, Moscow). The Creative Process featured The Shipping Tycoon and The Boxer from her LARB featured book of vignettes 52 Men, an "ingenious" "tad revolutionary" work compared to that of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwicke. Her work is a search for the treasure in the dark.
