The Sun is God — Teika Marija Smits

This story was recently published in the author’s debut collection: UMBILICAL (NewCon Press) HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous review of Teika Marija Smits is linked HERE.

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“‘No, Eugenie, that can’t be right,’ her father said. ‘For God is the Almighty. And not the wayward star about which our planet turns.’ His face had suddenly brightened. ‘Ah, but you must mean Jesus, His son. Ess-oh-en. Although the two words sound the same, they are not the same.’”

Near the outset of reading this significant story of painting-as-pain in the nineteenth century, the above homophone makes me think that the inadvertent chance that delayed my reading it till now seems a significant destiny so as to resonate with my concurrent reading, as it happens, of an even newer published work regarding ‘the sun machine’ HERE where this same homophone is also important! With other chance connections of art and its muse. And the coming of the ghost of a famous dead artist to be the model for some future artistic truth as rapture. All mixed with themes arising from Eugenie’s son strangled at birth by his own cord and her downtrodden existence as mixing  her own bodily parts as a paint mixer for her brother Edward’s art; indeed she is far more than just the brother’s muse as empowered by the explicitly pervasive sun. “And into all of this she pours her very soul.” But her own inferred self-portrait a still life of a broken jug. And there is, for me, a clinching elbow moment as pivot or trigger: “…turns to the ‘self-portrait’ of Edward, who is seated at a table with Emperor at his elbow,…”, Emperor being her cat, I recall. This story works on several levels and I am most inspired that I have been allowed to read it by whatever power presiding from within it.

“One day, she imagines, there will be great machines of steam to grind pigment and mix paint and imprison it within a metal tube…”