A Good Light from a Former Time

A GOOD LIGHT FROM A FORMER TIME Judith Margolis As I was destined to join in a great experience, as I have had the good fortune to belong to the League and have been allowed to be a participant in that unique journey, the wonder of which then had a meteor-like radiance and later was forgotten so quickly... Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East 1. The Moon In a dark time of my life, I came to live in an ancient city, Jerusalem - the city of light. I had the blessing of friends and family near me, and yet I felt my inner resources as an artist depleted. Though I dutifully showed up to work every day in the basement room that was my studio, my daily descent into that dim space seemed like a folktale's "time of ashes." Some crucial light had been extinguished for me. I was afraid I would never again create anything worthwhile. Then, as if I were being guided by unseen hands, I discovered a way to treat the "dis-ease" I was suffering. With dumb instinct, I sought the light, devising a ritual for myself that provided me with a source of healing. 256Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. ©2001 A Good Lightfrom a Former Time At the end of each day, I sat on the narrow balcony of my apartment and with binoculars looked up through the night sky at the moon. Despite the involuntary jumpy movements of the hand-held glasses, I could see the craters and mountains of the lunar landscape with breathtaking clarity Sometimes for just a few moments but often for an hour or more, I watched, feeling the moon's closeness, as if the sky was only a narrow boundary between me and the light. Not too long after I instituted this ritual, I found an image waiting for me when I went to my studio. 2. The Studio I often work in collage or collage combined with painting. From years of collecting, I had a dozen big boxes of old children's books, scraps of colored paper, postage stamps, candy wrappers, posters torn off walls, old magazines, fragments of failed paintings, my own sketches and doodles, old maps, color samples from paint stores. (I still laugh at what must have been the bafflement of the customs inspectors when they opened my trunks to find what would have looked like boxes of garbage to almost any eye.) There is a complex alchemy of emotion, perception and intellect essential to the making of art. My method is to search through the colorful and completely unorganized collection, dipping my hands in and pulling up scraps, then deciding what goes with what. The process is unpredictable; I often feel that I am its instrument. One morning, after an evening spent gazing at the moon, I began to paint a woman staring through binoculars at the night sky. The sky she searched was dense with letters, unformed words making no sense. The image needed a central focus. Reaching into a box of scraps, I discovered a small piece of black sandpaper that I had used to sand the wooden floors of my first student apartment 35 years before. It had looked to me then like a miniature galaxy, and I never discarded it. 257 Judith Margolis Now that old remnant of sandpaper was ready to become the "cosmos" at which the woman in the painting could gaze. Finding it seemed an inexplicably right coincidence. It had traveled with me through years of rootless wandering, buried in the mess of my studios, to turn up just when I needed it. If I could depend on random "coincidence," I felt I was back on the right track. 3. The Book ofLight It was at this time that my Torah teacher, Sara Schneider, introduced me to a passage from the Zohar, the great book of Jewish mysticism whose 258 A Good Lightfrom a Former Time name means Light. With her patient guidance, I translated the text (from Parshat Vay'ikhal). It describes a cube of light that emanates from the six directions to form a meeting...