A year ago I hung this little wool and wire sculpture in a lilac bush in my front yard:
I said I would photograph it monthly for a year, and I have, and now I can stop.
Here’s what it looks like today:
eleven months | ten months | nine months
eight months | seven months | six months
It’s the next-to-last monthly picture of this thing! Today was windy again, and I had to grab it and hold it still so I could photograph it. I ended up with this close-up shot:
ten months | nine months | eight months
seven months | six months | five months
Windy this morning. Hard to get a good picture of this thing.
nine months | eight months | seven months
six months | five months | four months
three months | two months | one month
When I discovered how bad the moth problem had gotten in my studio, I hung one of my wool-covered wire sculptures in a lilac bush in front of my house. I planned to photograph it every month for a year. And I did, for many months, even though I sometimes felt it was kind of boring.
This month, boredom almost stopped me. I wasn’t going to take a picture, but I did go out and look at it. And it was covered with snow, which was different. So here is a picture:
eight months | seven months | six months
Eight months already? How did that happen?
I feel like this sculpture looks: tired.
No moths in the studio, though. That’s good.
seven months | six months | five months
No leaves. Also no snow yet. No moths in the studio this month, which is a huge relief.
six months | five months | four months
Four months since I hung this little “birdhouse” in the lilac bush. Obviously, there are no birds living in it. I did see a big fat spider in there one morning, but that day was too windy for me to get a picture.
You can see that it’s been picked at, though. I like to think that some of the wool that’s been pulled out has gone into birds’ nests.
Words have been hard for me lately. There’s so much going on, and so little that seems worth saying about it all. And yet, silence also feels … not quite right.
I’ve been reading Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn. The introduction says:
Original nature has no opposites. Speech and words are not necessary. Without thinking, all things are exactly as they are. The truth is just like this.
Then why do we use words? Why have we made this book?
According to Oriental medicine, when you have a hot sickness you should take hot medicine. Most people are very attached to words and speech. So we cure this sickness with word-and-speech medicine.
So here is an attempt at medicine for whatever sickness I’ve got. I imagine I am not the only one. May we all be cured.
Some words that I keep hearing my head, an echo from 30 years ago: j’en peux plus. Translated from the French, they mean roughly “I can’t take it anymore.”
It’s not just words that have been hard. I have come to a couple of places recently where (oh, mercy) I just can’t take it anymore. For the good of all beings everywhere – for you, for me, for my poor therapist, for that confused bastard from out of town who is stuck in traffic in front of me – it has to stop. I cannot keep doing this dance. One of those places is in the studio, with the moths.
But how? A carefully worded letter to the moths will do no good. The moths are just exactly as they are, beyond words.
And then, a miracle: it occurred to me that I could take the guts out of “i know what i know.” I could cut the guts open, remove the felted wool balls, replace them with something less delicious. I could coat the wool in “bad signal” and “butterfly soup” with something both less toxic and more permanent than insecticide.
As I got used to the idea, I grew to love the process and the added layers of meaning. I am not afraid of work. These changes are a language that the moths will understand.
It turns out that the guts have a surprising amount of structural integrity, even without their wool stuffing. Maybe they will go back into the sculpture just as they are, light and empty. Maybe I will have to give the sculpture a new title. Maybe “i know nothing”?
After experimenting with some smaller felted sculptures, I settled on an acrylic-based fabric stiffener to coat the pieces that can’t have their wool removed. Will all that liquid make the wire rust? Oh yes:
Rust is rust. Change is change. Let them be exactly as they are.
As you can see, there’s lots more rust than there was last month.
And what have I up to, while my little sculpture has been busily rusting?
– Killing bugs. I have become a Bug Killing Machine. In addition to the ongoing moth issues in my studio, there are carpenter ants in the southwest corner of my house. I hear them in the living room ceiling, chewing and chewing and chewing. It’s an awfully big noise for such small creatures. The walls have been injected with poison, and I have contractors lined up to take the house apart and deal with the rot (carpenter ants love rotting wood) later this summer.
– Cleaning the mouse smells out of my car. Nature’s Miracle has become one of my favorite things ever.
– Regular vigorous walks. Also squats and lunges and push-ups, oh my.
– Exploring materials other than wool for my next sculpture
– Trying, as always, to find a balance between solitude and connection.
Dave and I went to Alaska for a couple of weeks. I didn’t take many pictures during the trip. The experience defied my limited photographic abilities and my grasp of language.
We came home to a mountain of mail, a very clingy cat, and a car that reeks of dead mouse. There’s no more snow on the ground. Lilacs are blooming. Mornings and evenings, I can hear a wood thrush singing in the nearby woods.
Last month I hung a small sculpture from one of our lilac bushes. The wire is starting to rust, and the wool appears to have been picked at by birds looking for nesting material. Here is what it looks like now:
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