Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light
Editor's Column from LCV Summer 2008

Driving up the dusty grey gravel road winding through the bright green rice fields and beneath the warm yellow light of the sun descending from a crisp blue sky hung with lazy clouds, I saw in the distance the classic bright tin roof of an Acadian country house surrounding by colorful pitched tents and a milling throng of people. I was southwest of Lafayette just outside the modest town of Maurice the third Sunday in May and I was on my way to say good-bye to a friend. The beloved Louisiana painter and photographer Elemore Morgan, Jr. had passed away and his friends were assembling to remember and honor him in an elegant quiet simple ceremony: a moment of silence, a dedication poem by the state Poet Laureate Darrell Bourque and a solo violin envoi by Michael Doucet. Darrell had read from his collection A Blue Boat:

Where Land Meets Sky
He loves this place he’s fallen into:
his skies of smeared lilac, his clouds spun
by muscled ether, congealed air so newly blue
it’s hard to tell it from the sky we knew once
and loved so. After shot-silk sky, what else?
All the earth and all that’s creatured in it. Tongues
of irises from the swamps, big lazy trees, bells
on boats in creeping rivers and cows like peace
flags grazing in the prairies, or lying in wells
of cow dreams making milk. He loves the creases
and the blur: stalks filled with rice to falling,
water rushing from pipes, and a leaf in wind. Leases
on anything that takes us to the places these converge,
a line in all we see and know, oh holy curve and surge.

Years ago, in the first profile I ever wrote about a Louisiana artist, thinking of Emily Dickinson’s idiosyncratic and distinctive voice, in yet another intersection between art and poetry, I described Elemore as painting from a “certain slant of light,” so deftly and uniquely did he capture the Louisiana landscape. Hanging prominently in my dining room is Domed View, a landscape of spring rice fields that Elemore painted from first light until the darkness following dusk such that depending on the intensity of light of light I play on it, its colors actually change. Soft light brings forward a blush of rose, light yellow and green and soft blues, but a brighter light, such as noon, transforms the painting into hot clear yellows, cutting sharp greens, and cold cold blues. Finally, if I pull down the light such as at dusk, the bright colors flee the canvas and surrender to eggplant purple, bruised greens, purples, and deep reds. Indeed, Elemore so totally expropriated that landscape by virtue of his art that driving to his house that Sunday morning I felt as if I were driving into the warp and weave of one of Elemore’s paintings even more than a physical space or place.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
At the farewell to Elemore I forcibly was struck by the monumental warmth and sense of shared sorrow and even joy of the community of people he left behind. In the weeks before his passing, as he struggled to recover from surgery in a Baltimore hospital, family and friends kept him company there and a digital vigil was shared with scores of others via an informal e-mail network. Sadly, it echoed for me with the same tragic vacillations of rally and decline I had only too recently experienced with the struggle to live of another friend and glorious Louisiana painter, John Scott of New Orleans, who mastered and defined the New Orleans urban visual landscape much as Elemore had the rural. As with Elemore, John’s family and friends kept a far-flung community engaged with his heroic efforts to recover from major surgery. In perpetual memorial to John, the Louisiana Humanities Center in New Orleans is now home to the largest permanent collection of his work in the world.

With the loss from our company, but never our memory, of these two truly inspirational artists, once again a poet’s words seem appropriate as a farewell. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh bard, penned these words on the occasion of the illness culminating in death of his own beloved father. I read these to my own father and would have to these two wonderful friends had circumstances made it possible. They seem especially appropriate given the art they pursued with such vigor and love:

Do not go gentle Into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief