Awakening

I stared icily at the floor by my feet.

"You call this art? There's no form, no expression, no artistry... it's just a piece of stone!"

My teacher.

O Providence--grant me one day of pure joy. --Ludwig van Beethoven

"You can't have originality and creativity without restraint! The difference between art and objects is the form. Creativity exists only within the form!"

All art is quite useless. --Oscar Wilde

I wasn't hearing words so much as emotions. Apparently this time I went too far. I wasn't completely sure what it was that was so upsetting. I made a statue of a man standing on a flamingo. Never had I worked so hard on a single work of art before! I tried to incorporate everything I had been taught--

You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation; close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. In time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test--some, it is said, die under it--you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. --Charlotte Bronte

Certainly, a man standing on a flamingo was original! I imagined being the flamingo, struggling to bear the weight of this man, wincing in pain. I tried being the man while looking in the mirror: nonchalant, as if completely unaware of the flamingo. I even tried to give the work a unified theme: "Some people just don't get the world around them."

Give until it hurts, until you can feel the pain. --Mother Teresa

And now, this. Perhaps hard work isn't the way to go? Why is this my fault anyways! I did what he asked!!! He wants form? I'll give him form. What was that work he did for the new park last year, the noble lion? I'll do a statue of a goat. A scapegoat. I'll go to a farm and take a picture of one, then reproduce it to a flea. Heh heh. F-l-ea. [snicker] Not once ounce of feeling goes into this work. Better yet, I'm going to do the goat in the exact style that he did his lion, and see if he can find any fault with it. That will teach him!

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence. --Marshall McLuhan

I did exactly what I said I would. I took a hammer and chisel and began making The Noble Scapegoat. He had goat scruff sticking out almost as if he had a mane. I even put his legs in the exact position the lion had his legs in.

In great art chance and fancy are gone; what is there is there of necessity. --Goethe

"Marvellous! Extraordinary! I always knew you had talent somewhere in that head of yours."

So far, so good. Revenge is sweet.

No bird has ever uttered note
That was not in some first bird's throat.
--Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"May I take this to an art show and get bids for it?"

Whaaat? Bids? For my own art?

The mind knows only what lies near the heart. --Norse Proverb

He indeed got bids. Plenty of bids. The goat sold for $5000, and I got commissions from two others for more artwork. The instructor spoke of me glowingly as "his most promising student."

Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers to the false prophets. --Jesus of Nazareth

That was ten years ago. I've been big time ever since. The city of New York even commissioned me to do a statue of its founder. It amazes me to think that I was once so childish. The heart does not have an IQ. My heart had to die before I could become an adult. I will always be grateful to my art teacher--my model, in my art and my life. It was by imitating him that I became the man I am today.

Questions on Faith

"For by grace are ye saved through faith..." (Ephesians 2:8)

Is there anything more empowering in the world than knowing that someone believes in you?

It gives an almost unnatural energy, enabling us to do things we wouldn't have dreamed of doing alone.

Without faith in God, we cannot be saved. Faith, so immaterial and yet so real, empowers God to save us from the evils of this Earth; nothing else will do. God is powerless without it.

Imagine a true, real community of faith: not just in God, but in each other.

We need people. All of us. Two is so much stronger than one. Ascetic hermitism just doesn't cut it.

What power would humanity have if people stopped competing with each other, and started believing in one another?


"Faith... is the gift of God."