Something is sculpting in the attic
And apparently, it can turn things renaissance
Is there a price for being good at everything?
Hi, everyone-
The first time I realized I was afraid of the dark was in an attic.
How about you?
The scary thing about attics, is that I can almost smell darkness.
So imagine the warming delight when you read an excerpt from A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein.
…
There’s a light on in the attic.
I can see it from the outside,
And I know you’re on the inside … lookin’ out.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I quote Silverstein heavily.
Maybe it’s because I love spending upwards of 1,200 minutes a week thumbing through archival literature of any kind.
Maybe it’s because his illustrations remind me of the kind of honest life my grandfather would always talk about in the 7,077 feet high Sumatran mountains.
Or maybe, just maybe, the art and architecture of this attic piece reminds me of a different roof-attic-ceiling piece from the year 1508: the Sistine Chapel.
When you look up the Sistine chapel, you’ll see the artistic bones of a roof.
Seeing the bones of anything without technology is always amazing. Seeing it in the flesh is even more so. That’s how I felt, at least, when I visited St. Peter’s square in Rome, just outside of the Vatican’s Sistine chapel some years ago.
And even then, I felt very lucky.
Just take a look at how small the people on the ground look in this aerial.
Now, imagine this whole plaza … packed!
I remember it was around the turn of the millennium.
The day the year turned 2000.
It was kind of like celebrating a birthday with the world, wasn’t it? The round number. The entire world counting down together. The papal procession in Rome. And the pope himself saying Happy New Year in over 100 languages.
What a stud.
I could barely say happy new year in three languages without salivating profusely. 100 seems … a lot!
My father is Catholic. So this was huge for him.
When the pope said “feliz ano novo,” I could see a big group of people from the audience congregating in the plaza stood up, raised the Brazilian flag, screamed and cheered unapologetically.
I could see my father wanted to get up.
He almost joined in.
The sound was so brilliant, it’s like you can feel it bouncing across the columns that armed the entire oval perimeter of the plaza. The same columns that hold up white statues of saints, centurions, and sinners. Reminding anyone that …
The dead are always watching those alive in doing everything they could to stay alive.
And maybe that’s what the cheering and screaming meant:
A battle cry to keep going until it’s better to cry than to battle.
Multiply this by hundreds of other languages—and your ear starts to have a few things to say.
Which is why, if you get to see the Sistine Chapel after this experience, you get to realize why roofs and attics are there all along:
Without a cap around the void, you can’t hear echoes.
Looking up the Sistine chapel, that’s exactly what you get:
Things that have preceded you before.
Reminding you of your place: the attic.
Telling you of your current limits: the roof.
And showing you the edges of limits left unexplored: the sky.
I’m not surprised that when Shel Silverstein talked about A Light in the Attic, he knew …
You’re on the inside … looking out.
Silverstein was known to be a renaissance man. I mean, how many authors do we know have successfully—and I mean, successfully—illustrate a series of best-selling poems?
It’s hard enough to produce meaningful text. It’s even harder to create a visual nomenclature entirely your own. In a sense, A Light in the Attic is as much a description of every human longing left unmet, as it is a desire to meet darkness with light.
But he isn’t the only attic-roof renaissance man. It’s no coincidence that the Sistine Chapel, one of the greatest architectural art in history, is also an attic-roof-ceiling production of another set of renaissance men:
Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo.
Whenever I write about these two greats—I feel a sense of departure. Their work was so vast and widespread—there’s something almost inhuman about them. Or almost multi-human. And every-human, at the same time.
I guess, therefore, the term: renaissance.
But I don’t believe renaissance is supposed to mean we need to be the all-around human who is good at everything.
I do believe though, that what da Vinci, Angelo, and Silverstein discovered—in roof-ceiling-attics of different kinds—is basically the same:
To live is to echo our being onto tangible surfaces around us.
Just as Michael Angelo did with his paint onto Sistine Chapel.
Just as Leonardo da Vinci did when he carved the Sistine Chapel’s art-framing to mimic the blueprint of his mind.
Just as the pope did when he uttered a calm feliz ano novo.
Just as the Brazilian contingency did when their screaming and cheering echoed against the militant row of columns, statues, centurions, and saints.
And just as Silverstein did when he penned A Light in the Attic—with an unyielding mind-framing only roofs understood.
All essentially cementing the reality that:
Once the work is out: It’s now up to the receiving vessels—the attic, the ceiling, the roof, the columns, and the plaza—on what to do with it.
If you’re lucky enough … you might find that the little opening in that ever-important creation vessel—a window in the attic, a skylight in a chapel, a slit between Roman columns—is just enough to let out an exhale into the open sky.
And when you exhale, you’re finally freed from all the necessary waste matters from your own creation process: tension, frustration, unrequited ideas, and the desperate need to finish.
The key is, of course, to make sure whatever creator vessel you enter, have both:
Enough firmness for creation to take shape, AND
Enough opening for excess smoke from the creation … to chimney out and breathe.
And if you don’t have both—creation itself will create a renaissance beast so ever-consuming, that it might just eat your every being.
Just like an echo in a roofless attic.
Paint drip that always misses a runaway canvas.
And an unprotected plaza where battle cries are lost into the open sky.
This, I believe, is the hidden price of being good—and being at an attic-height—of everything … Without a cap-roofing structure to say:
Enough. You’re good.
-Thalia
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-Thalia
As a neuroscience nerd of I’d say we are all “on the inside looking out.” The various sensory portals (vision, hearing, tactile (skin sensation), vestibular( movement and balance), proprioception (awareness of the body in space), olfactory (sensation of “ole factories), gustatory (taste) are the filters that communicate information from the “outside” to be processed in the brain and create a multi sensory image of the World. If you wish to extend your metaphor I would say that we all live in the “attic” of the embodied brain’s supportive and protective armature (muscles and bones) with its cranial vault, closely related visual windows, and surrounding other portals. It comforts me to know this since it means that the self emerging from such an embodied-brain-mind will be as different as the differences of experience, genetics, and the changes that occur in the portals over time. What troubles me is your bald assertion that St. Peter’s Square is “a stone’s throw” from The Vatican. Have you tested this hypothesis?
This piece is fillled with depth and Spaaaciousness.
Especially loved this: “Without a cap around the void, you can’t hear echoes.”