Letter From the Editors

Classical metaphysics posits that we have three ways of using words univocally (related but not the same), so really three ways to speak about Love. These ways are reference, analogy, and metaphor. Metaphor is the most fascinating of them all, as it is not concerned with proper relationality or proportionality. Love reveals His perfection to us in the imperfect. Everyday things, all things, belong to transcendental beauty and allow it to animate them in some way. The artist sees this deep transcendental beauty that erupts merely as a facet of being of all the dear, mundane, and imperfect vessels of the world.

Issue 8 presents profound portrayals of all things, from illustrations of whales that capture the majesty of their kind, a musical performance that will move your soul, to a poem about a sunburn. While the inspiration for the name of Vermilion originally came from Hopkins’s “Windhover,” when we created this issue, we realized it was for us in a special way related to “Pied Beauty”: 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Ecstatic praise is in the fickle. This issue is fickle in the best sense of the word because it truly, ordinarily, and peculiarly uses itself as a metaphor for Love. It’s difficult to Love, to witness the fickle nature of what He creates, to embrace it. Through creating an issue that is positively fickle, we aim to emphasize the embrasure of what God creates for us: whales, music, sunburns, birds, and many others.  Vastly different from each other, these things all inspired art that brought to the forefront of our minds a fleeing beauty. 

These “dappled things,” the fickle in which we find ecstatic praise, and the ever-changing nature of His creation sometimes seem unexplainable and difficult to appreciate on first seeing. But the artist remains with them. The artist must so too also be find that transcendental beauty granted to all things in the painful and the flawed. Eliot once lamented  

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The poet finds not just the beauty in the ordinary, but in the agony. He must allow his memory and desire to be stirred from the lilacs sprouting out of the dead earth. In sitting with the turn from March to April and watching the blooms poke  out of a dead cold soil, the artists of Vermilion have dared to find beauty not just in the fickle, but in the fruit of death–that time we call spring. 

St. Ephrem made the refrain of his Hymn number 31:  “Blessed is He who has appeared to our human race under so many metaphors!” We have the gift of metaphor to hold up the imperfect to the perfect and find beauty among it, because He has used it first to talk to man.  Let us allow ourselves to speak wildly, to depict bravely, and to attempt to hold a mirror up to our God by finding Him in our world and in art. 

David Moretti & Lauren McGinn 

Co-Editors-in-Chief