Published: December 28, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Poet Asks, Why Does Christmas Belong to The Moneylenders?
By Djelloul Marbrook 
A prayer for invisibility
Would it help to usher in the new year by not thinking ourselves a finished masterpiece, by contemplating Paul Cézanne's penchant for leaving some
canvas bare as if to suggest that invisibility might help us think less of ourselves and more of others?
Would it help to contemplate the scientist-poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's idea that color represents the suffering of light? If Goethe is right, the holidays must represent more suffering than Easter and certainly less triumph.
Would it help to think that the artist is not finished and that a more evolved race might indeed be invisible and silent-and therefore more inclined to see and to listen?
Would it help to study our dreams at least as much as we study ourselves in mirrors?
Would it help to consider that no painting in a museum or gallery is finished but that the remaining work rests with us and not the artist? Would it help to consider that the work is not for our enjoyment but for our contemplation, a difference that is perhaps no longer too fine to ignore?
Would it help to silence the bells, the organs, the jingles, the carols, the felicitations in order to consider that we are not doing as He said we too could do, that instead we are paying homage, not to the Babe as the magi did, but to the moneylenders, the usurers, and the gaudy lords of the ephemeral? Did we bail out the poor? No, we bailed out the moneylenders, which they took as license to abuse us the more.
What would it help? Would it help us to be richer, mightier, or would it help us to grow up to become the kind of people a humble carpenter once suggested that we might become? Would it help us to be more like the magi and less like the mob? Would it help us to be as still as the landscape is after a blizzard?
Djelloul Marbrook is a retired newspaperman. His second book of poems, Brushstrokes and Glances, will be published by Deerbrook Editions on December 20, 2010. His first book of poems, Far From Algiers, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University in 2007 and was published in 2008. It won the International Book Award in 2010. His novella, Artemisia's Wolf, will be published by Prakash Books of India in December. His novella, Saraceno, was recently published as an e-book. His story, Artists Hill, adapted from the second novel of an unpublished trilogy, won the Literal Latté first prize in fiction in 2008. The pioneering e-book publisher, Online Originals (UK), published his novella, Alice MIller's Room, in 1999.
Del's book, Far From Algiers: http://upress.kent.edu/books/Marbrook_D.htm
New review of Far from Algiers: http://www.rattle.com/blog/2009/05/far-from-algiers-by-djelloul-marbrook/
Artists Hill, Literal Latté's fiction first prize: http://www.literal-latte.com/author/djelloulmarbrook/
His blog: http://www.djelloulmarbrook.com
His mother's art: http://www.juanitaguccione.com
His aunt's art: http://www.irenericepereira.com
* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze
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