Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Horror, History, Writing
ISBN: 9781627152976
Google: m8jbrQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0670823074
Goodreads: 116334
Publisher: Viking
Published: 1988-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

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There might be people out there scanning these words and thinking, "He means that in a figurative sense, of course. He must. Because anyone who really thought stone gargoyles are alive.. .well, that would be a guy long overdue for a little rest-cure at the neighborhood funny-farm!'

But I do believe they are alive— know they are, in fact, and am in complete possession of my faculties (ask any lunatic and he'll tell you the same thing, heh-heh-heh). I began by saying I had very little technical education in the field of art, wanting to play fair with the reader and to explain why I could not simply stride up to my subject and collar it but would, instead, have to approach it in careful sideways hops. An objective a man armed with knowledge may take boldly, by frontal assault, a man armed only with intuition must take by guile, if he is to take it at all.

However narrow my technical knowledge of art may be, however great or small my ability to create it in my own field may be, I am not a culturally disenfranchised man, and I have tried to approach any creatively "made thing" with an open eye and mind—book, film, photograph, painting, sculpture.

Because I write fiction, my job depends upon my imagination. Imagination, in turn, depends upon that wide eye, that interested, examining, unprejudiced stare which may eventually judge but which comes to its subject utterly without preconceptions—only the hope one will see success rather than failure, not for any altruistic reason but for a sublimely selfish one: a creatively "made thing" inspires the person exposed to it with a clear sense of wonder and joy.. .and, looking at these gargoyles, I felt those things just as surely as I felt horror and a revulsion so immediate that it was almost instinctive.. .the way that some people feel about snakes, the way I feel only about bats and spiders.

A piece of sculpture, be it a sculpture by Rodin or one of those nameless stone horrors peering through the overgrown trashwood on the banks of the Hudson River, is not alive in any physical sense; it does not breathe, bleed, or, in spite of my imagination, fly away or hide behind the chimneys (I don't think so, anyway, although I could swear there were less of them when I...oh, never mind).

But the sky does not breathe, bleed, or hide behind chimneys, and yet we may say it is alive because it changes constantly. Not only is it different from one day to the next, but it may be different from one moment to the next, depending on our own moods, which, being alive, are in their own constant state of flux. We may not look at the sky as often as adults as we did as children, staring at it with that wide eye of total open-mindedness—that eye which is the wellspring of wonder and thus the doorway to imagination—but we do continue to look at it,

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