No.144. Recollected Fire.
"Fire, that striking immediate object...." (Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalyis of Fire, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p.2)
Yesterday afternoon, he painted a fire. It hadn't been in his mind to do so, but the decision came upon him with an urgent, almost corrosive ferocity as the result of his reading a passage in artist Lynne Wynick's brilliant new book, Edge. "There was a blacksmith at the foot of our garden in Llysfaen, Wales, 1955," she writes. "The flickering light from his forge, late in the evening, would send shadowy pictures onto my bedroom wall." It made him remember something he'd always enjoyed forgetting: that twelve years before Lynne's flickering forge, in the summer of 1944, he was awakened, in a creepy little house on the north-east corner of Princess Street and Division street in Kingston, Ontario, by images of flames dancing up his bedroom walls. They were the reflections of a huge, raging fire greedily consuming Anderson's grocery store right across the intersection, on the south-west corner of Princess Street and Division Street. There were no sirens, there was no ruckus. Just quiet crackling. The fire must have been suddenly new. He thought their house was burning down.
No. 143. The Rising Sun Sculpture. He filled his studio with what he regarded as astral clutter. The only still point in the heap of construction was an over-arching plywood sun. He labeled it with a poem, taken from a suite he had written last year called Voyages to the Moon.
A Rind of Light
a dish of island
sweetly circular
three hundred yards thick
turns the tables
as
a mountain
tectonic of labour
swings ever nearer
142. Votivity. His search for the elemental--and the therapeutically guileless--had led him first to sculpt a rabbit. He was grateful for the peace the little bronze creature had brought him and, as a result, he then wanted to mold a genuinely votive object, as an expression of the indebtedness he felt. The result was an exceedingly raw, rather primitive figure, an ur-man lying on his back, legs drawn up--a figure half in the throes of birth and half given over to the rigidity of death.
No.141. Rabbit Transit. All he wanted was a little serenity, and while making the conch shell had failed him in that regard, he decided to attempt an almost aggressively innocent sculpture--of a rabbit. He modeled the creature in clay and cast it in bronze. It was about a foot high. He was delighted that the rabbit finally gave him the almost childlike joy he had been seeking, mostly in vain. Althea (his wife) liked it too--and she was quite a severe critic..
No.140. Inside the Box. Everyday thinking about originality would have us believe that all conceptual freshness lay, like pumpkins in a field, somewhere outside the box, the box representing, presumably, home to the limited, manacled mind, immobilized by its own conventionality. But for him, the terrain outside the box, where all daring thinkers supposedly wandered in their quests for newness, was merely a raw, unformed realm and essentially barren. He felt certain that the best, most productive thinking happened Inside the Box, where ideas grew and flourished on the plangent whispers of what had gone before. Culture, he felt, was a continuum, not an aimless and distracting stroll in the woods. And besides, his box--which he had built himself-- was still, to some extent, open, slotted, ventilated. He could always take a fragrant kind of inspiration from the world outside, from the controlled breezes wafting through his floor-to-ceiling fenestration arrangements. People could think outside-the-box if they wanted to, but for him, that endless starting over, always setting back your conceptual clock, always waiting for the key of inspiration to turn and fire up the ignition of newness, was too iffy for him, too much like wishful thinking He preferred his wood-clad silences. His wooden box was, in fact, a little like a sauna. Or one of Wilhelm Reich orgone accumulators. But it wasn't sealed tightly enough for either of those. He found it to be, nevertheless, an entirely delightful cerebral concentrator.
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