"It hurts my feelings when someone says to me they think it’s ugly. I don’t see it. It’s beautiful. I mean, I’m only trying to create beauty, and I think it’s beautiful."
It’s the third day of Art Car Fest 2001. The sun set an hour ago and I’m finally talking with Rebecca Caldwell, the artist who drives "Carthedral." She’s a beautiful young lady, tall with dark brown hair, eyes deep with a carefully shuttered passion and a hint of a smile playing across her whole face. She looks like she’s in love, and she very likely is: in love, with everything. The power of her joy is a subtle force that fills the air around her. Get within three feet of her, get your first taste, the merest glimmer, of how she is experiencing the world, and discover then that you’ve become another of her satellites. I’ve been orbiting for three days, trying to engage the mind behind the eyes, trying to find any excuse to stand within her sphere of influence. Do I imagine that somehow a small measure of her creativity can pass between us? All I know is that she must somehow sense the vacancy in my own soul, for she has been subtly avoiding me with great skill.
We’re talking about her vehicle, the black death-themed hearse she has created. Sculptural, mixed media taken to a level that Art School students could scarcely comprehend, it’s a towering celebration of darkness. Gargoyles, flying buttresses, stained glass windows, and are those…teeth? adorn it. "I’m going to add some more texture to it," she says. "Not more weight, just more texture. I’m still experimenting with what might work. But I want to engage all the senses. I want blind people to be able to experience it, too." We run our hands along the vehicle. The surface is rough, not like sandpaper, not like small rocks, but more like what my imagination tells me a mummified alligator feels like.
"Oh. It looks like some of my lights aren’t working," says Rebecca. The lighting is what drew me over just now. The stained glass windows are lit mostly red, intricate webtraces making a diffuse glow, with sparks of blue in just enough quantity so that the red keeps impacting your visual processors. Each of the windows is its own work of art, and would be well received in a gallery or in any Goth’s home. In other places, low-illumination bulbs spotlight certain aspects, like the teeth filling one volume. My eyes follow the light, just bright enough to cast shadows, and so my imagination can draw up all the demons that have haunted me for years. My childhood fear of open closet doors re-awakens. At night, with the door open just a crack, I used to almost see the mechanical arms which could come out and satisfy their unfathomable desire to remove my privates. There’s nothing mechanical looking about "Carthedral," but it is able to reach down past my defenses and pull up my old fears. I shake myself to come back to the more pleasant present.
"Did you know I’ve got a sound system?" No, I didn’t, and for some reason it surprises me, and then I’m surprised that I’m surprised. Apparently her talents range even further than I suspected. She disappears into the car and after a few moments perfect music comes out. The speakers are a little damaged, but the tune is clear. It’s a tune from beyond words, that catches the attention of something behind my mind. Not a dirge, but still melancholy. Not exuberant, but still subtly joyful. It’s the last straw. My defenses are down. I’m ready to see the world through her eyes. And I suddenly have new perception tools, to have a look at that hole that I sense within myself, until now carefully walled off and hidden out of fear of what lies within.
Standing here in the black night in front of a blacker car, its lighting somehow making it darker, with my fingertips still tingling with a racial memory of decay, with the music challenging all of my preconceptions about the moment when life becomes non-life, I get it. Death is not something to fear. Why would we? We should honor it. It’s the last, greatest transition for us. If we have loved well, lived well, been true to our natures, shared what we have learned with those coming along behind us, then we would quite naturally embrace death when it comes for us.
Art often tries to capture the transition moments of our lives; the moment that two people fall in love, the moment that God created Adam, the moment when the day ends in a beautiful sunset. Rebecca has succeeded in capturing the most profound transition Life ever faces.
When I go home, my wife says to me, "For some reason, it’s easy to be near you now. You’ve lost some frantic edge that you had. You’re very calm." I could try to explain, but it would just be words. It would take a work of art to describe what I know and feel. It would take something like… Carthedral.
The car is beautiful.
