Angels and Devils

Let me briefly describe two images that have been developing in my mind, too vivid to be ignored, yet too short to spin into their own separate stories. If there were such a thing as a moving painting, I would express them as such.

The first came to me gradually, upon listening to The Devil's Trill by Vanessa Mae and envisioning a scene in a grand drama of mine, involving the three towers of Art, Story, and Music (which I promise I will elaborate on in a later post). The setting is a glorious concert hall decked in velvet and gold, and the central figure of the piece is a young virtuoso, a blindfolded violinist at the conclusion of his performance of a lifetime - arms outraised, with instrument in one hand and bow in the other. Ah, but I'm sure you've guessed already the title of the song and know that this can't be the entire story. For the violinist, in pursuing his greatest performance, has made a pact with Mephistopheles, you see; when he puts his fingers to the string, a supernatural power takes hold, and as the music builds an entire orchestra of the damned arises behind him as accompaniment, setting the wallpaper and curtains to flame. Orange tongues lick at the edges of the stage. A dark aura hangs overhead. The violinist smiles, a sinister gesture, his head tilted just a little loftily...the transformation complete.

A justifiably forbidding image indeed. Well, the second piece is as sparse as the previous is rich, as lucid as the other dark. It's idea came independently of any plotline, although it may fit well into my fable of Light and Innocent (another story for another day), instead drawing its source from Japanese apocalyptic fiction and the beginning of Gungrave. The view is above an arid, desolate landscape of cracked dirt beneath a brilliantly clear blue sky. Large infrastructure has collapsed, twisted steel from buildings and bridges protruding from the earth. Wreckage of an abandoned civilization. Dwarfed by all of this is our central figure, a girl of seven or eight, clad in a torn, dirt-smudged red dress. She has on her face a determined expression, as she drags with two hands a heavy metal chain, which is latched onto the coffin behind her. I envision her sometimes facing forward, chain slung over her shoulder, other times facing back, pulling with all her might. Whichever the pose, it is the coffin that tells us the true story - for inside it lies the body of a dead angel. Resting on its side, white robes and wings caked with blood, it clasps the broken end of the spear which pierced its chest. This then, is the sole hope of humanity. A child and her burden, navigating the endless slopes of destruction in search of rebirth.