Words of Redemption

In September, my wife and I went to Italy for two weeks. We stayed in Florence, Venice and Rome. It was an amazing trip. The food, the wine, the sights, the sounds. Two weeks, just me and my wonderful wife. Words just don’t do it much justice.

Pictures don’t either, but the two can come close when combined. We took a ton of pictures. I’m not a photographer and I don’t pretend to be, but if you want to see a thousand pictures of Italy, click here.¹

While there, I discovered I had a fascination  for taking pictures of statues. Actually, not so much entire statues as just the heads of statues.

Several of the best of these pictures came from a series of statues on display outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Pictures like this one:

And I realized a few weeks ago why I took so many pictures of statues on our trip. It was something I probably knew at the time and couldn’t express until I thought about writing this post.

I took those pictures because I was enamored with the humanity cast into stone, as if each slab of marble was always meant to end up a human visage. Look at the pictures above (click on any for a larger version). Though the eyes are vacant, do you see the raw and human emotion²? The grief and anger? And in marble no less. I’m a simple guy, so forgive me if I seem overly amazed at the idea of taking a large lifeless piece of stone and turning it into this:

As raw and formless marble or granite, only the artist can relate to the beauty and potential that dwells within. The artist then goes to work. When complete, we all see the beauty the artist always knew was there. Through the process of carving, chipping, sanding and shaping, the artist makes something human out of something abstract. Something amazing out of the mundane.

That’s how I want to write. I want to take stories, situations, people, places and words that the world looks upon as formless and boring slabs of stone and turn those into something human. Something lifeless that makes us feel alive. Something contrived that makes us feel truth.

Something that shows us who we’ve been, who we are and who we can become.

- B

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1. Now Phil, on the other hand, is a good photographer. If you want to see what Italy looks like from a better lens, check out his pictures. [↩]
2. Of course, the vacant eyes only add to this in my opinion [↩]

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