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| The Curiosity of Lurices - sculpture - clay - Ellen Jewett (click to enlarge) |
"Caught up in a mass of abstractions," writes David Abram, "our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth -- our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
- David Abram... quote (and photo above) found in the Myth & Moor entry, Relationship and reciprocity.
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I have a strange dichotomy in my own nature that, on one hand, I've never quite felt wholly of this world, but, at the same time, on a more cellular level, deeply enmeshed in the natural world - the wild world - from which I've always drawn sustenance. And, when I found the beautifully organic clay sculptures by Ellen Jewett (example above) on Terri Windling's (always elegantly eloquent) Myth & Moor blog today, the reality of my present situation sort of came home to me in the same way hearing the video of the thrush's song did a few days ago. In other words, I may be living near the deserts and plains of the American Southwest now - and, that was my choice - but my roots are still in the forests and seashores of New England... where the world outside my door was somehow more intimate, intricate, dense... and magical.
Very much like the entanglement of Ellen Jewett's hare - and really, its expression is a masterpiece in itself - a tribute to the wild women and men in all of us. (Note, too, the moths and/or butterflies on the hare's back!)
Anyway, this is today's (unpremeditated) post. Another "interlude" entry because I'm not really back to blogging yet. You might say I'm just dropping a line as I wander thru the wilds of the most recent interstitial realm I've fallen into.
Oh, you know: Greetings - from the rabbit hole! ;-)
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April 28, 2016
Hares are called jackrabbits here in the southwest, and I just saw what looked like the "antelope" variety on the dirt road behind my house yesterday in the early evening. They're incredibly lean, long-legged hares and do have a strangely deer-like quality about them when you see them in action. Very cool! Meanwhile, I just found a YouTube video of a gentle jackrabbit in someone's backyard... and just had to add it to this post.
Beautiful sculpture, a blessing to recognize your roots, even if far from them.
ReplyDeleteYes, Ellen Jewett's work is beautiful. She has an enviable technique of transforming clay into other substances entirely. Alchemy!
DeleteRe: roots. Well, it's a funny thing about roots... because on some meta-genetic level, an individual's roots go back a lot further than those which are discernible in the scope of one lifetime. I think many Americans suffer for this reason... because they've been disconnected from their ancestry. So, on one hand I can understand the immediate roots of my recent corporeal history, but, on the other hand, so many of these roots lead to other, more unapproachable, levels of existence I can't hope to understand.
And, then there are those intuitive impressions we sometimes get of having ties to existences and experiences which are not explained by ancestry... but, don't worry, I'm not even going to go "there"! ;-)