Welcome to day 27 of 28 Days of Have Heaven, a short month of posts about heaven, paradise, perfection and desire, perfect places, art, theology, gardens, and more, using the Enya song “China Roses” as a jumping off point. Each post will look at these elements in itself, which may not obviously connect with the others, and which may only peripherally be related. I won’t attempt to tie the posts together. They’ll all be listed here, as they are posted
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This post is doubling as my Wednesday Vignette post today.

I made this collage in 2012. On the back, cut from a magazine, is “If you’re here, you’re everywhere,” and hand written below that, “heterotopias.”

One of my heavens is a heterotopia, a here-everywhere place that changes how time is experienced, a counter-site critical to the functioning of the human imagination because it contests and inverts the relationships according to which normative spaces in the rest of society are constituted. A heterotopia can be a place out of ordinary time, or it can be a momentary glimpse or a shift.

So in this collage are the layered, liminal, disjunctured places of botanical gardens, islands, tourist towns, trains, the sea; the exotic, cocktails and the kinds of places you might get a cocktail; places of inclusion and exclusion; abstract art, captured images, manipulated images; birds, who come and go; shadows and reflections, undefined impressions.

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“The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Beauty,” in “Nature”

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