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Show Moon - 72 Now that they'd moved, there was no more Sunday school, so it was necessary to invent a religion. Her plan was to establish a village where everyone was loved and happy and had a yard full of trees and a horse, plenty of art paper, rooms for music and dance. She wrote books of hymns and prayers, drew pictures of the houses and the plats of land. Here was where she became conscious of perspective and the idea of boundaries. What she had once drawn automatically became a source of anxiety. Why must a fence get smaller when it's farther away? Should she end the picture here or there? How to draw the inside of a room? Where should the observer stand? What's it like to see a room when you're tiny, when you're tall? Is there a way to show a room in a "pure" way, with no observer at all? Then there were questions of theology to work out. She decided that since the soul is by definition the good of a person, there couldn't possibly be punishment for the soul, which after death was all you had left. This was something she'd worried about ever since her mother had told her about the Catholic idea of Hell and she'd put that together with the realization that she was not a very nice person. But, the Christian Science Sunday school teacher had told her God was Perfect Love. She decided that death was a place of angels and absolute delight. Joy kept her plans in a box under her bed and showed them to no one. Art in any form is flawed if you are looking for something a court would call "the truth." I think there is another kind of truth, though, and on that, I would swear my life. I would tell you that this is my life. I am staking everything on these pictures in my mind. But if you were to persist, saying, "but |
