Dreaming of a Lighthouse
A companion piece to the assemblage sculpture Lighthouse, a beacon for ancestral light.
Where have you gone where I cannot follow?
Some far-away place, where I cannot be,
A distant shore on the other side, a great cemetery of blue,
A safe harbor, built from the sands of an hourglass tower
Each grain is a shadow marching toward the light
Hundreds of overturned bellies ashore
Become Sirens of smoke and breath,
Eroding clay bodies, shifting shells
Reaching toward a permanent homecoming
At the luminous center of the otherside
Beyond cruel living waters
In that new bright house on the other sea,
Will you become a stranger to me?
In that great ocean that divides us,
As I remember you, will you remember me?
Amid an old lighthouse we all one day will see.
Lighthouse(2024) assemblage constructed on a glass lamp base with sand-filled base, black painted Limulus polyphemus (horseshoe crab) shell interior, and vintage glass blown Edison lightbulb. The lamp is touch-activated at its base with a dimmable bulb.
One day while my father and I were driving next to a beach, he told me that as a young man, he would throw horseshoe crabs into the ocean. During the spring and fall, they’d crawl along the beaches at night, illuminated by the moon and the flash of a lighthouse. He explained that despite their tough-looking exterior, these ancient creatures are sensitive to light and often find themselves beached from a rough wave in need of assistance.
When he and his friends would happen upon one, they would pick them up and toss them back into the Atlantic for a second chance. In a dramatic splash, the ones that were still alive would right themselves and scuttle away under the waves, back into the dark. Staring out a the beach from the passenger window he said that these spiny creatures were living relics, existing virtually unchanged for 445 million years and, by extension, were one of our oldest ancestors.
For the horseshoe crab, time is an unobtrusive acquaintance. Their curative copper blood stretches forward and backward through time, a steady watcher of human change from the ocean floor. For them, the world of sand and sun is the only interruption to an immortal life. The beach, turned funeral cot, is perhaps only a resting stop for this ancestor. For the horseshoe crab, death is a moment in the light.
Light is one of the key factors in ancestral veneration. Candles are lit as a way of guiding spirits through the dark of the past into the light present. Huddled around the connective source, a warm light that reminds us of home, we feel their presence. The Light acts as a source for spirits in their various states of embodiment, a warm glow lit by someone who remembers them.
Many years later, when my father was in the hospital he’d complain extensively about the fluorescent lights, saying that they were killing him faster than the cancer. The harsh buzz kept him up at all hours, unable to comfortably sleep on his back in the quiet dark. Once, to distract him from the hum, I told him that there was some promise coming out of studies done with horseshoe crab blood and its rich components had potential as a curative for cancer.
“Who knows dad, you could be immortal after they give you a shot.”
“Nah. I don’t want to live forever.”
For humans and horseshoe crabs, death is a tidal force of creation and separation. A demarcation that divides us from our beloved dead on distant shores and a uniting force that brings together the living. Though we know that our human lives are transcendent, we know that in death they are no longer the same. Those of us who work with the dead are intimately familiar that there are no exceptions to this process. We all become ancestors, knowing that one day we may leave behind those who have yet to join us on the other shore. This is never a surprise, but it is always a shock.
Though we’re not ready to join them, we are ready to hold some of what they’ve left behind. A small light is at the center of our chest, that gentle beam that connects us forwards and backward in time—a memory of life beneath the waves and a death that returns us under. In my quiet moments, I think about a horseshoe crab turned over on a beach under a moonlit night. I sit next to it and flip it back over, disrupting its dream of a far-off lighthouse.