Fall Falling Leaves Moon
At the Walker. Shocked out of my move fixation, gladly so. What I hoped for. A major exhibition covering years when art turned over on itself and the Walker made its reputation as a nationally significant contemporary art space, Art Expanded, 1958–1978, challenges boring old representational painting, stiff granite sculpture, and anything else considered traditional or usual at the time.
It got me immediately into careful looking, following disinhibited artists as they struggled to use a radical new freedom, going with them to places absurd and funny. An example of the latter is a small notation for a happening: Turn the radio on, turn it off at the first sound. This zeitgeist was mine as a young adult, traditional sexual mores, traditional career paths, traditional power structures, traditional decorum was all suspect and suspect in such a way that the burden of proving itself useful to the human project lay on tradition.
The Walker is an osmotic membrane, the world of art pushes at its curators and they try to let through only the most innovative, most balls against the wall, most beautiful, most lyrical of the very new. It is an antidote to burying myself in the minutiae of moving. So easy to do. Artists trying to replace sculpture with three video screens, two larger and one smaller between them, stacked vertically, with strings like those of a bass arranged in front of the screens and a stool behind for the screenist to use while playing push me away from the taskiness of the move and back into the realm of, “Oh! What’s this?” A place I consider my natural habitat.
So it did not surprise me when I sat down to eat lunch that my mind strayed to a mind-full meal. It went like this. I had a fruit salad and a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. Fork into grape. Huh. Roots captured water, distributed it up a vine and into the developing fruit, swelling this taut case until it was full. The leaves captured solar energy and created carbohydrates. Sweet. Wine. Kate and I at the KSNJ dinner on Kate’s 70th. Mogen David. A melon. Kate makes melon salads every summer, puts them in a long plastic container and we eat them throughout the week. Pineapple chunk. A happy worker makes good fruit. The Dole plantation philosophy on Lanai, now abandoned to the techno-baron Larry Eliot and his desire to create a sustainable, profitable community. Strawberry. California’s Central Valley. Drought. The precious water contained in this strawberry might have come from last year’s snow pack in the Rocky Mountains. Then, the bread. I don’t eat bread anymore, but half a grilled cheese sounded so good. I went ahead. Diabetes. Why do the things I like a lot turn out to be bad for me? Days of grilled cheese and Campbell’s tomato soup. An Alexandria, Indiana gourmet lunch.
Now this is not mindful in the way of savoring the grape as a tight oval, bursting with juice, breaking the skin with sharp front teeth and feeling the first squirt of liquid on the tongue sort of mindful. No, this is a mind-full lunch in which I allowed free association to guide and slow my eating. The blueberries. Those Augusts on the North Shore wandering through burned over or clear cut forests, gathering wild berries, eating as many as I picked. The blueberries we have outside in our orchard. That sort of mind-full.
