The Stone Giant
Where the vision came from I cannot say. It was there as if it had always been there. The it in question was a great stone giant, perhaps 40 feet from waist to the top of its head. It was carved from a rough-hewn stone, gray and white, with a texture that reminded me of sandstone, though how I ascertained that, I cannot fathom; I never moved within a hand’s reach, even though I can report coarse texture from a visceral place in my being. Its features were idealized as only a sculptor can see with simplified details and flowing contours and few hard edges. The subtle ear and artful cheekbones led to a jawline with the strength of Patton’s army.
It emerged from the ground, rising suddenly and with the unexpected force of something that cannot be guessed. I searched my memory for the film from which I’d plucked this tidbit. It wasn’t there. I considered movies on television, then anything animated that I might have missed. Nothing. This was mine. But why did it seem so like a memory? The image above does nothing to get at its appearance I must grant.
After the great torso rose from the ground, it pitched forward and its two arms came down and fists met the ground to keep it aloft. Did the ground shake? I can’t recall, or perhaps I never knew. The universe was swirling as this happened. I told one of my guides that the world was melting.
What happened next can scarcely be described in the English language. The steam shovel of a jaw opened and a sound started. The sound came from far away, a roar softened by distance, but it grew. And suddenly a jet of molten lava shot forth from its mouth. The lava glowed with the orange of pumpkins, the yellow of bananas and the slightest hint of tomato red. The lava didn’t just arc out of its maw like Saturday night’s beers issuing from an undergraduate’s unguarded stomach. No, the jet of liquid rock the temperature of a sun blasted forth ignorant of the pull of gravity.
It did not abate.
While the scene started over several times, many times, countless times, never once did the stream falter. I watched the magma begin to collect and spin, to roll into a sphere in the sky. This enormous swirling mass of liquid rock grew and at times rolled or spun in a way that I could see it was not yet perfectly spherical, as if there was a portion destined to fill but was not yet there and the preceding mass sloshed like water in a spherical fish bowl not quite full.
The giant was creating a world within a world.
My guides asked me to describe what I’d seen. It seems ridiculous to try to verbalize something few artists could render, but I did my best. When I finished describing the visual of the scene I then went on to the next step, something that felt perfectly natural in the moment. I told them the stone giant was me. Even though I was watching from a short distance, it was me and I knew that to be true the way I know the face of my mother. It just is me. The fire hose of lava? That is my creativity, my potential, what I have to share. And the world that was brought into being with the flowing mass? That was mine, too. That was me creating a world, something that I can do within the limitless bounds of a novel.