A Doorway to a Doorway

Patricia Geary

We love the experience of glimpsing someone else¹s creativity because it is revealing and intimate: a doorway into the mind of the artist, the inspiration and the hesitation, the intelligence and the fear. Penny McElroy¹s exquisite sketchbook, accompanied by evocative poems and messages, reveals the inner workings of her intriguing process and yet remains as fleetingly elusive as her rich body of work itself. As she writes in her attending commentary: Inside, you feel left out in the cold / all good is inside, inaccessible to you.

McElroy¹s haunting sketches and poems stress, almost invariably, her deep and unrelenting longing for the Other.  Lovers shall soon be separated. A child is juxtaposed with train tracks and the unknown, brooding distance: the tale of parting. Doorways lead to mysterious landscapes, which are only glimpsed, never entered. Hands reach up to giant birds in flight, birds that will never take the seeker/ the child/ the artist to the secret garden that she longs to enter. Ladders like star light on still water travel to what can only be glimpsed as a world of remote clouds, trapped in bubbles or reflected in the mirror of the ineffable. Children gaze longingly at remote passageways A door, a garden / the usual story.

A smile must have windows, McElroy tells us. But where do these windows lead? She sees the world running away. And still she reminds us: You remember the forest / planted for you.

These images are planted for the viewer. How beautiful it is under the shadow she remarks, revealing the lonely child, the stairs, and the doorway. We are free to fly on prisoners¹ wings, and she shows us birds¹ cages like balloons, clouds captured in impossible bubbles.

Perhaps most revealingly of all, more than the lost land of the dream world, the tearing apart of the lovers she could not bear it and the road that may never be taken, McElroy writes: She couldn¹t help it, she was afraid. / The beautiful dark wood / the proud white door. As the hands reach up, always beckoning, always searching, the giant, commanding rose blooms in the distance: And his spirit / followed her.  But shall we ever be allowed to walk through that doorway?

In the center of it all, The Magician, she tells us. The artist remains in the center, always beseeching us to enter but never quite letting us inside. The state of longing is an exquisite and hidden labyrinth, and McElroy teases us into believing that we may journey with her, into her complicated and elusive world of windows and doorways and pathways, and blue ravens. In the both exciting and contemplative process of experiencing her sketchbook, we are left with the illusion of on allusion, like a beam of radiant light.  And each time we experience these evocative images and haunting words, we believe, yet again, that one day we shall cross that disappearing threshold.

This essay (©Patricia Geary) first appeared in Everyday Mystery: a sketchbook by Penny McElroy. The book is available on Amazon.com.

Patricia Geary is an artist, novelist and poet who lives and works in Redlands, CA.

The Veil of Longing

Patricia Geary

When you enter the art of Penny McElroy, you agree to walk, eyes shuttered, as if accepting a temporary blindfold, through
the Door of Mystery.

Then, when you have dared to cross the threshold, you drop the blindfold and gaze about the new world with wonder: what strange and wonderful objects might you discover? Everything you see is exquisite, sumptuous, lush with detail and texture and elegant workmanship… but look again–is the object of your gaze an image of inexplicable beauty, so stunning that the heart pauses as if in awe, or do you gaze instead upon a moment of terror in a world of irrational violence? Or, rather, have you been  allowed a glimpse of what might transcend them both, beauty and terror, transforming the realm of the mysterious and allowing you to discover what lies before your eyes in the realm of the ordinary? That bridge of transformation will take you back into the whirling spirals of your innermost self.

So many of the recurring images in McElroy’s art speak to this longing of returning—longing, for instance, for the golden childhood that lies forever beyond your reach.  Who is that man (your father?) mowing the lawn in that tangle of limited surrender? What is that man (your husband?) in the answer inside your questionpondering? The wholesome, simple images juxtaposed with the exotic splendor of their backgrounds—unidentifiable machinery over an embroidered lawn, tickets in ritualized rows as if containing the secrets of the universe–acquire the edge of a David Lynch film, only his pumped up acid colors have been muted, a cheap factory rug magically changed into a handmade Persian carpet.  Ah, you say, this cannot be sinister—it is too beautiful! But you have been deceived. Did a purer time ever exist? The layers of McElroy’s details reveal themselves in slow increments before your eyes: what appears to be exotic religious iconography in a turning night of stars, for instance, is simply a peacock-spread of sewing pins (Why are they piercing the rose? Why the elbows? Why the gloves?). You look and look again:  on closer inspection, what was nameless and exotic is simply a packet of thread or a painted egg, a panoply of rhinestone buttons sailing up and forming the night sky. 

Now you look round and discover that the safe, comforting details of a nearly familiar suburban landscape have rearranged themselves into a stairway to the divine.

And, yet, what of the terror you see in the familiar?  You are not allowed to escape into the tranquility of the merely beautiful, the purely ordinary. Something more frightening lies coiled around the surface, sometimes not entirely visible and yet always omnipresent. Is there a magic carpet to ride upon that will take you out of the realm of danger? There are doorways and darkened rooms, corridors endlessly receding, and you hear the line of the poet Rumi, with whom McElroy conspires tirelessly in her work: Where, where can I be safe?

In eternity will inherit it  the open palm spreads before you and offers a butterfly: here it is! Make what you will of what
I offer you! 

Or perhaps the mysterious apothecary shop in the most living moment contains something that will be able to change the leaden world into gold? Small jars lie on shelves full of sand or strange medicines, potions, and elixirs. The ritual boxes are reminiscent of the voodoo work of Betye Saar, the precision of a Joseph Cornell box. You wonder: is this scientific evidence you can trust? And what do you make of the receding, as if into a doomed perspective, of the background world in still one light? Is this an infinity point, or the end of the world? Shadow images fade away, as if you are trapped in an abandoned subway in earth and ashes. You are tantalized with answers only suggested, with questions vaguely posed.

The world pulls away from you like an ebb tide, and the body is a trickster as well, sensual and duplicitous. In whispering with god we see the interior and the exterior, the delectable round image of the flesh paired with the diagrammatic structure of the nervous system: one protects, one offers, and they hover before an ambiguous backdrop, suggesting both musical notation and medical machinery. Jewels cover the genitals—but no: when you look closer, you see that what appear to be gemstones are actually electrical fuses…then, perhaps you should merely measure the skeleton as the mysterious hand proposes in dancing to inward music? The self is divided into cogs within a wheel and falls endlessly away: everything mirrors everything.

If the world were not so beautiful, you might despair. Hands are offered, birds sail away, and a child’s fresh face turns hopefully again for the watching parent or the passageway out of this world.

And then you understand. 

The mysterious door you have entered you shall enter and enter and enter again, gazing each time upon the object of fear or the image of luminous grace or the revelation into the self, balanced oddly and finally on the palm of the extended hand. You must learn to savor, as Rumi does, the constant incongruity. In a world filled with heartbreaking beauty and heartbreaking terror, Where, where can I be safe?

Perhaps only in the memory.

Look again: what is extraordinary masquerades as the ordinary, and the divine resides in the simplest of domestic details, the arch of sewing pins, the exotic world of the temporal, the everyday.

Treasure that discovery and hold it close to your heart. Long for the transformation even as you embrace the contradiction. McElroy’s exquisite, provocative images extend from the simplest surface detail to the most profound depths; there will be no safety for you until surrender to the lack of safety. 

Lift the veil of longing, and then lift it again. And then again. Nothing  resides beneath, only the lifting.

Patricia Geary teaches at the University of Redlands and is the author of two highly acclaimed novels, Living in Ether and Strange Toys, and the novella, The Other Canyon.  She also practices yoga in Redlands, California, where she lives with her husband, Jack, and son, Denis.  Strange Toys is the winner of the 1987 Philip K. Dick Award.