Zola wrote the coal mine in Germinal into a monster, swallowing the proletariat in its dark and forming the body they might grow up and through by striking—natural germination the mine's greatest antagonist, strings of root stretching themselves to outrun black lung.

Yeller's infection with rabies by a wolf in Disney's Old Yeller, which we had on VHS, sparked my childhood's greatest fear (by which I mean that I was afraid of madness and its consequences, the fatal and dispossessing things that rise up but fail to rise out of the dark).

To strike in mining can be a movement of labor organizing against the conditions of the place, or, tangibly (and inversely), the discovery of gold or a rich coal seam, but the word comes from the gentler Old English strican for flow and the Germanic streichen, which means to stroke.

What enters the room ahead of the word itself, of course, is a match's light.

Van Gogh loved Zola, and the year Germinal was published, he finished a dark-dark painting of peasants sharing a meal of coffee and starch, everything "the color of a really dusty potato."

Under the oils, van Gogh aimed for "not a hand but the gesture" of a hand, and he practiced sketching the bodies again and again before he painted from his parents' rural home in the Netherlands. 

The faces would dissolve into the dark if not for the gas lamp that hangs just left of center, over the shared dish—casting its yellow across clay-like noses and knobbed cheeks.

Stop.

Reel the words back: real to retire; rove and romance and remember; renegade and repetitive, tepid and tops and spin.

Quality of light came to the fore in Zola's fiction when he left the literal darkness of Germinal and entered daubs of color, boundless momentum, and the meandering bounce of attention—a move that made the source of anything harder to trace.

Porochista Khakpour writes on chronic illness, on the bouncing of light: "Women simply aren't allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too, and then it is by some miracle or accident that the two can be separated for proper diagnosis."

Or it reads like light to me—both the sort that signals destruction and the one that signals hope.

Nevertheless, what she says of illness has, too, been my experience. Lead and mercury in our water undid us in ways no one thought to measure correctly for years and years; and then they did—all at once, explaining us to us.

Momentum is, too, what I'm afraid of.

Like madness, like mirrors.

Khakpour's monster is hydra-like, if visible, but it never is visible.

Justice might be what you see is what you get.

In Yayoi Kusama's "Love Is Calling"—an enclosed two-minute installation with mirrored walls and ceiling and every surface covered in giant polka-dotted tentacles that are lit from within in changing colors—a love poem plays over speakers, even as I know the clock is ticking down until the moment I'll be shuffled out the door.

Hildegard von Bingen received divine inspiration via tentacles like Kusama's, like a cow's udders, or that's how she drew the inspiration in her own illuminated manuscripts of the 1100s, interrupting a background of gold.

"God comes in pink," is what I've decided she meant to say, or "sometimes God is not the light, only what the light has to shine against."

For lit class in Catholic high school, I wrote an essay arguing that the Catholic Church was the monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which went over fine with a teacher who loved Ecclesiates.

"Everything is meaningless!" is what he would shout, sometimes, from the front of the classroom.

Dodie Bellamy, I learned, spent ten years in the cult that the one I grew up in spun off from. It was a Doctor of Naturopathy, in our group, who finally called for the tests that diagnosed my family. He too, though, talked us out of treatment that might've helped.

Cult is just another word for a place closed off from a light source outside of its own, and it's not one I like to use.

Bellamy, investigating her former group, wrote that one of its whistleblowers "seems as slippery as Houdini. With the blink of an eye, he could vanish forever."

Alchemy, it seems, is the divine thing—turning the invisible visible (or vice versa) all the time; it's not the light I'm after, then, but the moment of its inception: it's the strike.  

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 Madeline ffitch's novel [Stay and Fight] makes reference to planting asparagus seeds as an act of faith in germination and a commitment to the land—because they take around three years to bear fruit; that concept lives under this piece. The abecedarian itself came of a prompt by Pam Houston in a workshop at Fine Arts Work Center. As for materials: here are notes I consulted on [Hildegard von Bingen] and on [van Gogh's relationship to Zola], plus ["Potato Eaters"] and [sketches of its sequel]. And here's Bellamy [on Eckankar], Khakpour's memoir, [Sick], and Kusama's eerie and vibrant ["Love Is Calling"] in Boston.