Looking for a stone

Michelangelo's Atlas

Fuck the Sistine Chapel.  It’s a work of awkward contrived decoration at best.  Mike must have been in the desperate shoes that all artists find themselves in to stoop to such a distraction.  Or maybe the ego of his greatness was so awesome that he convinced himself that it was an important work; but I’m telling you it isn’t.  It’s grand, but it’s gaudy and it’s tasteless.   It’s awkward and forced.  The awe that is inspiring is the tourists lining up with their camcorders to see such a soulless greatness, and the echo that you hear in the gallery that houses the captive slaves.  The average Mike doesn’t even know that they were done by the same genius that conceived of the Vatican ceiling.  The Pieta might be Michelangelo’s greatest work, or possibly the greatest work the world has known, but the slaves may be the most natural and honest.  I might have mistaken their creator for a Taoist monk; finding the form in the rock.  Unfinished as we expect things to be finished, but as perfect and sublime as a work of art could be.  I can’t tell you how often I think of the slaves.  So often the best works that artists have produced are the works that they have done for themselves, with no strings, or better yet cash, attached to.  Have you seen Velasquez’s Aesop and Meippus?  It seems like as we get older and continue to fail, our egos subside, but it doesn’t make it any easier to find the form in the rock.  You almost need to un-do or un-learn your years to be comfortable enough to let it happen.

I spent the morning looking for a stone.  The steps leading down from our back porch land on a muddy patch that I tried to plant to grass this fall, but had been trampled by mid-October pumpkin carving with my friend Josh’s two little girls.  Regardless, with all the effort I could imagine, I don’t think that it’s a spot for grass.  When Rhonda and I were walking with Rafa last weekend we found two intimidating stones that seemed right for planting at the bottom of our steps.  The first was so large that I couldn’t even lift it off of the ground.  I’m not as fit or strong as I used to be.  It was the day after my 37^th birthday and I was feeling my age like a stripper who leaves the dance floor with only a buck.  I went back to the house for a hand truck.

The two stones that day were the start of our path, but we needed at least one or two more  (although Rhonda is becoming increasingly worried with my obsession for collecting and arranging stones).  This time alone at the cabin for the weekend, I walked down our road into the woods.  I thought about driving to the Greenfield Farmers co-op to buy one, but there is something about finding one that seemed right.  This place feels like it grew out of the ridge it is perched on.  It was ruined in the 90’s buy a builder or owner who had no ear for music, but we’re trying to do our best to find what it needs to be.  It was built on rock, literally, without a foundation, and the landscape around us at times seems like a sort of quarry-well.  Each day I feel like new rocks are being born out of the earth.

It started to rain when I was planting the first two stones.  I’m 37 now and I live in the city with a warehouse of umbrellas.  I had forgotten what it was like to get wet in the late October rain.  I thought about going in and starting a more arid project, but instead I walked into the woods.  The autumn colors look different when it’s raining.  They remind me of when I was a kid.  They’re like the madras shirt I bought at the Gap in high school.  As the trees loose their leaves the birch show themselves, Rattlesnake’s ridge grows longer in each direction.  When we bought this place late last winter the view from our back porch was all we needed, but as summer devoured us we we’re suffocated by the overgrowth.  We re-discovered the view of Rattlesnake with a chainsaw and gave ourselves the luxury of a little room to breathe and a little sunshine. 

You can’t go looking for a stone.  When I studied painting all those years ago my instructor Paul would tell me to look toward the subject I was rendering not at it.  It took me five years to understand what that fucker meant, but when I got it I got it. You find things when you’re not looking for them, when you’re not forcing them.  Maybe you don’t.  I veered off of our path and down by the old garden. I was damp and cold, but I felt like I hadn’t had the luxury of being this kind of uncomfortable in a while.  As I made my way back through the woods and over the would be brook in the spring once the snow melts, I found the stone I had stopped looking for on top of the retaining wall I had built this past summer, just a few steps from the landing where it would live.