So.
Today's thoughts are influenced, I'm embarrassed to say, by the heat'n'humidity. I'm such a wimp, in some ways -- susceptible to the vagaries of weather, easily stymied by the moistness of my own skin... Even as a kid, I remember, I was fixated, during summer nights, of arranging the sash windows in the dorm room just right, to allow the hot air out at the top, and the cool air (wishful thinking here) in at the bottom. And then going back to my damp cot, waiting for the corroborating waft of breeze, to let me know I hadn't wasted my time...
Anyway, here is my new little fan, whirring reassuringly, and the sparrows chirping on the fire escape in the alley way, and my van slowly reaching cooking temperatures, parked out on Market Street. I'm rearranging things in my space -- freeing up more wall space, for newer emerging studies, and also moving supplies from the area where, I'm told, a new wall will be installed tomorrow. Which, in a way, is so much like my life these days -- the tidal quality of my ever-ebbing energies washing relentlessly and somewhat impotently, back and forth, back and forth, across the fields of my accumulated materials, my accumulated sketches, my piles of paints, my stacks of notebooks, back and forth, momentarily considering, but then redepositing, like the desultory rearrangement of worn quartz pebbles on an unpopular beach. Back and forth. Here and there. Or there. Or there again.
Another thought, brought to you (?) thanks to Miss April Field, a former student of mine from my teaching days in Philadelphia. She shared a video of juried student works from a recent SNAG (Society of North American Goldsmiths) competition, 'Fluxuation'. Her work is in part II, and is quite striking. Among the other works is what looks like a hinge-topped little box, worn like a locket on a chain, and containing what looks like a wasp's nest in one section, and maybe some waxy mirror image in the other. The work was constructed by Samantha Mitchell, from James Madison University, in Virginia, and it's the title that made me sit up and take notice. 'No seed ever sees a flower', she said.
'No seed ever sees a flower' I have been nearly suffocated -- even moreso than usual, lately -- by the awareness of my own imminent death. Maybe this is because my father died just after his 66th birthday, about 18 years ago. (And my own 65th natal day bears down on me, in the autumn) Maybe it's the fallout from the shame of having allowed myself - as I see it, at least -- to be drummed out of the academic world, just two years ago now. Maybe this death-dread has seemingly intensified because, at long last, I feel as though the artwork I have blundered into making now is the strongest, most unapologetic and uncompromising that I have ever managed to create. So of course, now would be the time to die. Or so I tell myself, thus tying my own hands and feet together, as it were.
But... 'No seed ever sees a flower' I almost don't want to 'know' too much about this little proto-haiku. What I can appreciate, sweating here in the studio, just hours after having first, accidentally, read the thought, is its potency in re-focusing my creative attention. I hate to admit that, with the upsurge of this surprising vein of work (and at an age where, according to Otto von Bismark, as he lay out the cynical Prussian 'retirement plan', I should be lying in a coffin), I've become distracted from the work itself, and have been wondering, almost subconsciously, about when the inevitable critical approbation would show up. When will I be rescued? And while I wait, I'm becoming impatient, it's sad to say.
No seed, though, ever sees a flower. If I can adapt myself to accept the role of seed-hood (seediness?), then concerns about rewards and punishments, for some reason (and maybe only for today?), seem to fall away. The seed is tight and closed, taut and compact, focused and blind, incapable (for the most part) of anything but accidental locomotion. If, even for a little while, I can slip my arms into a kind of seed-hood, I could anticipate a kind of liberation -- not from work, for goodness' sake, nor from sweating, nor from hunger, nor even from ultimate dissolution. Just for today, I think the best I could ask, as a seed, would be an escape from the burden of my greatest nemesis (which was operating, actually, even in that stifling orphanage dormitory, with the carefully-balanced sash windows), which is,, and pretty much always has been, hope.
