A Test of Faith

Rene Magritte, 1928-1929, The Treachery of Images.

I don't recall my dreams very often nor do I think much about religion. But recently things have been a little different.

In early May, I had a dream that began rather abruptly. I was driving off a cliff into a gorge. I remember going over the edge, the car falling out from under me as it traced a slightly different arc in space. I was able to grab the steering wheel just before impact, just as a storm of images assembled itself like cobblestones beneath the tires. The car righted itself and my free-fall turned quickly into a climb up the opposite wall of the gorge. Pictures paved the way. Each image full of faces and places I had never seen before.

Several days later I dreamed that I was shuffling through the prints I had chosen for my graduate exhibition. In the blink of an eye they became oily to the touch and the inks that had once described the things I photographed began to move across the pages. I picked up one of my favorite prints for closer inspection, lifting it by the top-left corner. The image slid in a series of eddy-filled streams off the sheet onto the floor. There was nothing left to see but paper and a puddle of ink.

In my mind, the two dreams capture the essential characteristics of imagery. On one hand, images have utility. They allow us to be transported or transformed, to imagine possibilities. They focus attention and sensation. On the other hand, images are little more than arrangements of materials. They are subject to the forces of nature and will inevitably become dusty, scratched, or faded.

Because of this tension between imaginative possibility and banal physicality every image invokes a test of faith. Do I believe in transubstantiation, here and now? Can this thing escape the limits of its own body and become something divine? Gods and Devils both have something to say about it and recently their whispers have been turning into screams.