Sunflower

Why does the princess smile?
Why does the prince weep?

---the swami.

Ah, sunflower, how distant your light seems to me today. As if it was a memory. Or a fading image. Frail light, no longer the dazzling seam of imperial robes, no longer the resplendent glory of kings. You have become something utterly simple, elemental. Neither possessed of inner strength or of intrinsic value, and unable to shrug off your weariness of time, to set hearts ablaze, and yet still we wait for you to turn your face this way, still you mean the world to us.

~~~

I think one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to was Lucio Fontana at the Hayward. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any images of his 'Harlequin' online.

But this is what I remember of it:

Fontana's harlequin, patchwork being, with a patchwork heart, like a sufi of old, ancient shaman. That golden mosaic running through him, a diagonal of burnished gold-or was it gleaming, glimmering?-that held him together, that went through his heart. The quintessential line of thought, beauty. Perhaps harlequin was struck by lightning, the golden flash of insight and intuition fused, has made its way to the surface, like the veins of gold in a rock, a truth that inheres in the body, that pierces it, a gash, a wound, the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary...

And I think to myself: what a mystery it is to ponder: who placed it there? Are you not, too, like this Harlequin, with your golden band and streak of morning sunshine in your eyes, all the time weaving a blue ribbon in the hearts of men?

Gold is a constant element, gleaming solidly in the underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the arms and regalia of warriors on the mead benches.

How far away is the black sun, she asked.
I don't know, but about this far away from home.