The Space

Years ago, under the influence of some drug, before I'd seen Andy Goldworthy's work, I did a couple of outdoor installations, three maybe. One was just string, wrapped through an orchard, lines in space. The major piece I've described somewhere, tree-trunks cut slightly higher each one, in a perfectly straight, marching away from the window where I wrote at the time, with a lovely head-shaped glacial erratic sitting on each. The third was a series of photos, encased in plastic, thumb-tacked to trees along a path. I'm going to do Burma Shave signs coming up the driveway, that great poem of Harvey Albert's, "Seven tigers, / nothing unusual, / never mind." D and I for a few minutes today, in the Richard's gallery, where the Wrack Show is to be installed, talking very seriously about extremely ephemeral things. Did a bit of on-line searching for sand-blasting techniques. I've blasted wood before, several times, but I'm not too proud to learn. Being self-taught in so many different areas, I really don't know how to do certain things, I just do them. I learned book-binding completely from books, looking at pictures of the various steps, decades after I learned, and had bound hundreds of individual volumes, a woman visited the farm in Missip, Anselm Hollo's wife at the time, she was a restoration binder for Brigham Young University, and she was watching me bind a book, ask me where I'd learned, told me I was good enough to teach the subject but that I did everything wrong. Wrack Show. So we're standing in the space, the gallery, for an installation it is A SPACE, and D asks -where's the inside and where's the outside?- we discuss options, agree the outside needs be larger, a Sculpture Garden, the pergola, the suggestion of porch roof, then in the two eastern corners, two more small walls that seal off the corners, skeletal walls, a few sticks, with a window, and inside the space would be an object. These would be like the back of other buildings, at the edge of the outside, peeking in the neighbor's house kind of thing. Peeping Tom. Inside will be two rooms, again skeletal stick walls, doorway openings, maybe arches if we can find the right sticks, I'm sure we can, a bedroom and a sitting room. D is building a bed, end tables, and a lamp for the bedroom and we'll conspire together on the chair, one of the premier finds for the show. Outside we have the sand-blasted objects, on stump pedestals, at least four so far, a horse head, a cow, a blasted walnut stump, and the prolate sheroids, each, I think, on a separate stump, in a cluster, a Sara Grouping, different heights. And we have the balls, D asked, and I'm not sure how many, I don't count them, I just retrieve them, maybe 42, maybe more. The bowling ball. And there are wall mounted pieces, several frames, a magnificent burl that will be blasted and finished. Coming together. Show opens November 14 and we have three weeks to install. 100 hours of prep work and 100 hours to install, I think, is about right. I'm excited about doing this show even though I know there will be interruptions in my writing, but I'll be writing about it every chance I get. The Combined Arts, I've preached this sermon, require working with other people, and I'd rather be alone, but the chance to do this show, define that space, pulls me from my isolation, probably a good thing, I might do another play, a Pinter in the basement, I'm not anti-social as much as I'm tightly focused. I ignore almost everything. Increasingly I rely on D and the Deputy to keep me informed, though the Deputy came back at me today, for something last night I said about something Pegi had mentioned. Childbirth, god help me, this is a no-win. All I was saying was that if you had roofed a house in mid-summer, sliding backwards up the black tar-paper, nailing courses, and using short nails, you would hit your thumb, and then, because your thumb wasn't working exactly correctly, you'd hit it again, and several more times, and probably a blood blister below the nail and you'd have to drill it out. You worked eight hours, and then you dealt with the injuries, patching yourself up, not bleeding through, and finally the waves of pain are linked to your heartbeat, you get a couple of drinks, smoke some dope, whatever, pain is not a gender thing. Something D said I will not mention here, it was very funny but very incorrect. Oh course, Dear Deputy, I will defer to whatever. Count me in. As an indicator: when Palin's name came up, I lost electricity. She was disappeared. I lit a few candles and wrote longhand. What are you going to do? Deep into imagined responses I uncover what I imagine to be myself, someone like me, throw it up as a decoy, a clay pigeon, see what happens, have I ever advised you?