Rocks, Water and an Island

Yesterday I was out moving chunks of granite around, and this morning reading Space and Place, by Yi-Fu Tuan. To paraphrase, Tuan claims that breaking the bounds of gravity is the innate desire of man, and he was not referring to the difficulty of picking up large rocks, but rather to ice skating. I would add other activities in which there is total freedom of movement and an attempted or perceived escape from gravity – surfing, sailing, great sex, and colliding subatomic particles.

So what about man’s desire to go deep into the earth, and what are the physical attractions to the solidities of metamorphic and sedimentary rocks? This is the complementary desire for security. According to Tuan, a social geographer who taught at the University of Wisconsin, “human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom.” I hate more than anything to be tied down, but on the other hand, those rocks, which are the foundation of my art, provide a resting place. The ideal subject matter? Water moving over rocks.

I’ve used “man” in its now out-dated sense to include men and women, but something I read this morning made me realize how far we have not come. A story about the origin of the yoga pose “Matsyendrasana” (Lord of the Fishes) tells a fish and flood story about a man who rescued a fish, only to have it later save him and his ark in the great flood. Many eons later, Parvati begged her consort Shiva to give her the secrets of yoga, so that she might use them to help humankind which was once again in a fix. He took her to a remote island, imparted the secrets, and then realized that the neighboring island, looking so like a rock, was actually that very fish referred to above. So Shiva transformed the fish into the first great yogic teacher. And Parvati? The story I was reading forgot to say.

A fetching farmland

Many natural and man-made objects rise to the surface of a Maine field. Rocks are the obvious ones, and at the time that this part of the coast was farmland, rocks were piled in walls along the boundary lines. Even now, rocks continue to surface with every winter frost, and the litter of stones, boulders, and pea sized gravel across my piece of property is a reminder that once this area was a mile under a glacier’s ice. The Drinkwaters, who kept cattle here in the last century, added their used machinery to the rock wall, and in the past year, we have fetched up, for instance, inner tube tires preserving 1920’s air, a still shiny Sterling truck hubcap, a rusted out carjack, and yards of barbed wire. There’s more to come. My neighbor has a wheel and axle set which when turned on end is a dharma wheel waiting for prayer flags.

Each of these products of industry partakes of wabi sabi, that Zen concept of the singular and melancholic in art. The rust, the organic color, the minimal form, are all reminders of the passage of time and the transience of existence. One of my discoveries – and I have no idea what its original purpose was – is a bowl-shaped piece of metal that can be held in the hand. It has the simple elegance of raku pottery. As a form, it asks the viewer to collaborate with its original maker and the processes of the natural world, in re-creating it as a piece of art. Explanations of wabi sabi and postulations on the relocation of art from the viewed object to the collaboration between art and the observer require many words. More pleasure is to be had pondering the fundamentality of a well-worn rock or an all-day every-day hubcap.

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