The airplanes, and cities, the buildings, and the little items of getting along –  newspaper racks, and household objects, the labels on boxes and cans, the bodies of machines,  vehicles and fixtures, these become what we think the world is, what it looks like.  The early 20th century modeled its world on personal craftsmanship, creating outsize dream mechanical hands, applied to the new privileges of better mining and fabrication technologies for metal and stone.  These items of personal craftsmanship, handmanship, the metal work and the onyx and bronze, chipped and melted, poured, sanded, polished to ornate side lamps and steam liners with meticulously riveted panels, you don’t have to tell me about the compulsion to make with the hands a buoyant built world, not with words. Have you have you ever swum to the very bow of a ship in the water, to the lapping, constantly redrawing line of water and hull, the bow jutting over your fragile skull like the weighty shadow of a loose rocky overhang, and a third of the ship looming underneath your soft paddling feet like you are the angel of a world that will never know about you.

We are playing hot potato with the idea of the world, passing it one to the other, the message of the idea of the world, that changes a little with each telling but what else have we got to pass.

I inspect the new work space. The windows, south facing, but not offensive, at least not in May… maybe something will happen in later months that leaves me frying and blinded, but for now, and likely thanks to the section of the building that blocks my view to the east, effectively shading my windows from the morning fry, we won’t have these problems even after May. Here I am with a view of loading docks and industrial roofs made of glass, with copper hatches oxidized greenblue and rows that open and close with iron gears and pulleys and specially fabricated one-of-a-kind turning mechanisms in lovely green and rust red grid.  The optics make a pressure bubble of the front part of the studio, waiting for me to finish sorting objects.

I am in a little denial about how ready the studio is… Sasha’s self portrait is placed so that his India Ink eyes follow me around the studio, they look at my sternly when I am on the studio sofa, and with pity when I am at my work table. Pan hasn’t moved in.

See how the words curdle when I get my hands on my studio tools, I am all business, I have now done so much, it’s as if gnawing thing got a business license.  I have a full kit for wall-painting, an old wooden Pepsi crate with studio towels and cloth bags, spray paint, adhesives for nearly everything including some steps of taxidermy, and wig glue.  Plus velcro in so many sizes and colors that I can be picky, my yellowing cylinder of zip-ties of four different sizes and three colors (cross self and give thanks), a bin of extension cords that is always one short of the kind I need at any time.  Another crate of studio work lights, dirty and dusty, and my new LED one, a trillion times better light, and less likely to explode into my eyeball because of combustion issues.  And books, reference books, my glaze book that I wrote my recipes in, pictures and the toppings of my altar, the detritus of what do I create, what do I remember, and what do I call to myself despite knowing better.  Pan is waiting, in the hallway, no fez, no internal organs, they are carefully stored in a box with the paint brushes. I tell him, ‘you have to wait for me, Pan, you made it this way,’ and then I drop my voice to a spooky whisper, ‘you got no thumb.’