FRANCIS HOVLAND

FADE IN:

EXT. THE MINDSCAPE - DAY

A VAST, ROLLING TERRAIN—rocky and black, rough and colorless. It is an indomitable SEA of giant curling shapes: porous, unmolded blackness, monumental in scale, but infants of the earth birthed from the grand boiling-over point of the pure red-hot forge. This is ash-rock: the igneous primordial surface that was belched from fire as a molten ooze, shapeless and formless. A stiff, rolling ocean of bare hills—waves, frozen in place. It is unpioneered by vegetation, without a smith to mold its form. Deep below is the obsidian glass, those crystalline ribs that yield the ingots of potential precious stones.

A DEEP RUMBLING in the earth. It quakes below. and it thunders above.

The sky is darkened by THICK, BILLOWING CLOUDS, so dark and heavy they could almost be made of stone themselves, an images only disproven by their solemn rolling movement like a sea itself. They rise up from the mount far in the distance: the fiery furnace from which all is forged. Its heat emanates from the bellows, itself an oily fluid that slips its way through the air. Ash SPITS OUT—smoke exhaled into the sky from the great mouth of fire, filled with the boiling fluid from the stomach of Gaea, Mother Earth, who as of now remains unnamed.

This place is roughness, without the diamonds. To the earth, all is mundanity. It is all mere sameness. It lacks one to pull stones apart from the rest and call ones special and others ordinary. Diamonds are worthless before mined and cut, refined and polished. But there is no laborer: no one to call out the diamonds from the rough.

And so I enter. A craftsman, a wanderer in search of the valuables. I am the first to enter this terrain of possibility. And already my path is laid, guided by the first signs of life: the pioneer plants take root in the volcanic aftermath. Life itself begins anew. They are signs waiting to be read. So I follow my guides.

I journey the path up its slope, my feet sliding in the crumbling ash-ground. The fine dust hovering in the air makes me wheeze, threatens to choke my dry throat. It is burdensome indeed, but I was made to crawl this way. Now I pass through the veil of its ash-born fog, into the great cloud atop.

My voyage climbs me toward the immense inferno. To most others, it is a hell, but to me, it is a kiln from which my mental shapes are breed into reality. Down below bellows the belly of the incessant uncontrollable magma. It cries out in an infantile searing screech. The great misbehavior spitting in my face— My face which by now has become closer kin to melted wax. But I stand up strong.

MINDSCAPER

Let me summon up the blood from this earthly artery. Render now unto me the reality within! Render to me the reason of the world!

Quickly my voice is drowned out by the immense rumbling of the down-bellow. I scream again-

MINDSCAPER

SUMMON UP THY BLOOD TO ME! REVEAL TO ME THE WORLD TO BE MADE!

But it is of no use.

Staring down into this thing, my weakness increases hundredfold. My attempt to stand strong crumbles like the stone surroundings. How can my demands be met at the foot of such a leviathan? My impudence falls. The ground shakes beneath me, rumbling my wobbly joints. No longer do I stand defiant.

I fall to my knees.

I lay there, listening… listening to its bubbling motion. Now my ears adjust to its great sound. Its screech now raises in register, and now I register it as a scream. And soon its scream becomes a cry. And amidst all that noise, I find a silence. In my deepest whisper, I see a glimmer at my feet.

I pick at it, lifting it to my eye, brushing away the ash. It is a little ingot. A rock certainly, molded crudely, but one different from the rest. It is like a pearl from a great oyster. This mount’s harsh nature cannot be tamed nor mitigated, not demanded nor conjured. It is reality of the harshest time. Easy to consume, quick-tempered and ready to erupt. I stare into it and wonder, why am I not eaten up yet? I came here for answers, though it refuses to yield them up, it gifts me something different. The diamond in the rough.

I descend the mountain, emerging from the looming cloud that envelopes its peak. I gaze into its form, studying its solid shape and size, fiddling with it in my hands. Though in the moment I threaten to be lost in possibility, the earth quakes.

The rumbling cannon threatens to burst. “Fire in the whole!” Imagination of its purest form, honest and true, spews from the top of this mountain, raining down to baptize its slopes in roaring fire. And within its heavy clouds are great flashes of LIGHT. Rocketing at such incredible speeds, dust spewed out rub together in the friction of creation. Energy blooms within.

I saw liquid fire bleeding down from the side of the mountain. It poured past me and lit the plants in its way ablaze. And so I bent down and heated my tools, sharpened from hunting for great ideas in the woods, and worked away at the ingot. Sharpening and cutting, crafting it into something new. In my hands, it coalesces into form and shape as nameless matter renders into particulars, identifiable and given names. For just a flash of moment, I am present truly. For an instantaneous passing second, I know where my place is. On this great slope, a diamond is born.

Art pulled from the aether, given shape by the artist. The artist lives at the precipice of change, where reality is at its most volatile yet its most vulnerable. They commune with that magnanimous soul of the world, hungry to craft from its fires a new idea, give it a name, so that it may reveal to the world the name of the one who made it. Not merely the one who cut it, but who hath given it birth. It is a talent God-given, grand and treacherous, mysterious yet simple, its nature elusive to all, especially the artist. All hath the potential to know the great value of art-making, for in all hearts lie the desire to do good. And you who chose to continue to nurture your heart’s desire, soon come to know the greatness of your own soul, and soon you come to learn also your littleness in the world. For know that our duty is not to create Beauty itself or command it be birthed like light from nothing at the beginning of the world, but instead to make it known within ourselves firstly. Once it is hewn from its rough place, we let it shine as it is, trust that it made perfect by the furnace of your own heart.

HOLOGRAPH.