Seagulls out the studio window, out the factory window, the brick and poured cement industrial building, the seagulls even though it’s only 20 degrees they are screEching  outside the factory window, in the wind circles, far away how they almost always sound unless you have fish.  And the words got up all over them, in their wings, going gingerly the wrong way against the lie of their feathers, while i prayed quickly, if that can even count, to become the state of mind that brings the most peace.  But I have conditions, i’m no spotless bodhisattva, my conditions are that i see, that i be shown, that i see whatever would be shown. i am now looking at the optical shadows and thinking of BFuller there’s a name to remember, too, BFuller, thinking of the makerness of him.  How lucky the technology was available to record his writing and speech, not to mention all the entire body of his work, within a technology that keeps it and re-presents it.  presents it again.  So that i can read it and see it as another maker, another aspect of the maker, and take a lesson, lordy, let me take a making lesson from the always BeingFuller Buckminster.  How lucky for his mind and also the particular state of the iron age, the mid 20^th with its exquisite machinery and baby budding spore hatchling digital nature.

‘Take control of it you’re making it’ is the message i am hearing getting.  Look how he tells the story with every intricacy covered, mentioned, concerning all.    I think of what he said about us being completely invisible in the layer of shimmer around the planet which he says not as a poet but as a scientist regarding the reflective nature of our planet’s surface including depths of the ocean to the outer layers of the disappearing ozone and whatever nimbus of reflection we seem, ourselves, to emit.

But i get practical, i am the maker after all,  i think of critical mass, which i learned in ceramics in glaze making, about melting temperatures and how individual particles, yesiree, individual particles melt at different temperatures depending on the admixture of neighboring particles. Depending, then, on the recipe.  the milieu.  Which means we can control the temperature at which the glazes melt, and get good, before they burble and fry and slipsizzle off the clay into a pool of graphite grey.

i get wound up about the level of intensity that i know i’ll experience when i read more Buckminster Fuller, and i will, but i also have not one but two copies of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks on their merry way to me  – one to read and the other to art – and how much else i have in the making, unfinishedness being part of the GreatAllIsOne.  And i will be worst case scenario paralyzed with awe, and best case able to work on the tiniest percentage of wondered possibilities.  Now that i read BFuller’s speaking style i’m more at ease, it’s like everything he knows is rushing out through his little-bit-too-small-voice, so that some of the words get hung up, disappeared, into the ethers, waiting for a page.  Unfinishedness

However, once the work has absorbed my meager mind, there is the getting about of the work – documents to produce, correspondence, time she ticks, the arm is getting better but it is weak, unable to bear.  It flexes and turns well.  one-handed, that’s how i made this epoch, i am one-handed, i am not in the studio art material, i am on the writing machine, the teleself.   i think of the graceful amazing sculptures of george rickey and how the stories wouldn’t be fully written unless they whirled like so.

I go to see them in my pictures and i am re-seduced by the shadow, this time as that of a miniature Calder, compositionally exquisite, near perfection except I can’t pick it up and stroke it directly on my eyeball.

I think also of BFuller’s compassion for humanity not having any shred of information about itself except what it can scrape and assemble to make a story that satisfies, after it invents ways of seeing and talking about it, and we keep upping what a baby can know so that the human world is regenerating in our minds, a most unstoppable mass collaboration of creators all too young to have so much responsibility.

I think about the great makers, the great producers of magnificently full presentations, Fuller and da Vinci and Newton and Shakespeare and Hendrix, who brought and brought and brought and how i could buck up and fill in my writing with care in honor of these great makers, i could try and have my socks pulled up evenly just on account of being in the same shimmering invisible world as them.

I hear Pan making a slumber party scary noise on the other side of my wall, cha cha cha cha cha cha he chirps thirstily.  If it wasn’t scary, it wouldn’t be what it is.  I make it this way.   I decide it.