gargoyles

Sculpting started for me when I figured out that, although I really liked writing, it was so lonely. How lovely it's been to be lonely as I wrote, to be lonely as I hammered at the keyboards of three successive laptops in cafes while people presumably watched, wondering how interesting I really was. How lovely that was. Having given up the pretense of trying desperately to look interesting, I find myself with much more energy to actually do things, some of which turn out to be interesting, many of which are not, but all of which have that edge that a life spent mostly in fantasy does not have: they are real.

The sculpture started with a dream. I was at a museum gift shop in Balboa Park, and saw for sale a dozen small metal pendants. These were the shape of four-sided dice, a little rounded at the corners, each about the size of your pinky fingernail. On each side of each pendant was inscribed a Chinese character. Each one had a small tassle, like the kind that would hang from a graduation cap. They were for sale at the gift shop. I knew, with the knowing that comes in dreams, that these things were very old and powerful magic, and should not be for sale. One of them, if given to a person, would cause that person to be well-disposed to the giver; not forced to be their slave, you understand, just a little bit well-disposed towards them. In the hands of the wrong person, they could facilitate much evil, thought I, in my dream. What I had to do was take them from the museum. So I snuck back to the gift shop that night, smashed the case, and saw that I could not hold all of the charms in one hand (which I should easily have been able to do since they were so small). I put them into a bowl on the same shelf and used that to carry them away.

My dream-analyst (who I didn't know was a dream-analyst at the time), Jim Foreman, had a field day with this one. I was seizing my power, said Jim, and about time too. A power that had something to do with art.. and could only be taken in the context of the feminine (that's the bowl).. and there was something about the number of them, 12, and the number of sides (4), but I've forgotten. I've found Jung's numerology theories impenetrable. In the dream I felt guilty for taking the bowl. It felt like theft.

But it always feels like theft. Robert A. Johnson advises in Inner Work to honor my dream in some way, no matter whether I can understand it all or not. I had some oven-bake craft clay, Sculpey, sitting on a shelf the past year or so. I made one of the Chinese pyramids out of silver clay, painted it and carved it, bought a tassle at a fabric store.

Yowza. You haven't touched inner power until you've held in your hands an icon from a powerful dream. I remember wandering around with it, showing it to the glassy-eyed stares of people as if it were a pearl of great price, feeling like a goof but not caring. And every time I touched it I would feel this electric charge all through me.

I recommend this to you: if you have a dream and there's something in it you can make, make that thing.

This is the pyramid hanging from the dashboard of my car. In the shadow is another one hung in the garage so it touches the windshield just before my bumper hits the wall of the garage.

I'd like to say my life just straightened out after that and everything became perfect. It would sound pretty cliched, and I'm pathologically afraid of sounding cliched. Unfortunately for my sensibilities, as a matter of fact, that's just what appears to have happened. I was able to make the decision to propose to my wife, I used stock-option money I'd hoarded for many years to buy a really nice car I'd always wanted, got a condo too. I finished the novel I'd been working on for eight years. All in the space of six months after I made that thing. None of this was smooth or perfect. It was not the fantastic, beautiful, easygoing, carefree, cosmopolitan life of the wealthy world traveller that I had been aiming for and never achieved (because doing so was impossible). But it sure had one important thing going for it that all my built-up fantasies of the perfect life just did not have: it was real, whereas all the years of fantasizing had managed to produce not one single real thing.

When you try to quickly create something without meticulously planning it, it'll often express something from deep inside of you. What it is may not be clear even quite some time after the making of it. I had the idea of making a gargoyle fridge magnet, thinking perhaps I could duplicate and sell them with molds and such. This worried little guy showed up after a worried evening's sculpting. Know anyone who knows how to duplicate a small object like this, with lots of fine detail, and undercuts?

I made these and several others, until I got rather bored with the idea. I decided to make the ultimate gargoyle fridge magnet, that being an under-represented market I did believe, and still believe; it shall be Death, and Life, a reminder and a sermon, all on your fridge. Feel No Sorrow for Me, Dear Traveller, For As I Am Now, You Shall Soon Be.

Now if you'd ever met my dad, you might have seen the face here as a bit familiar. The strange thing is that I didn't see my then recently deceased father in the sculpture until a few months after I'd made him. Yes, he pivots so that you can see both sides of the story, depending on the prevailing kitchen mood. The Biblical reference there is Ecclesiastes 3:2; "There is a time to be born, and a time to die." Functionally, though, he has a tendency to want to slide off the fridge, and he's too delicate to be dropped; and my wife simply does not take a shine to the skull side of the thing. Life's dark enough, it's true. This one made it into the Small Images show (Spanish Village, Balboa Park), 2001.

Here's a fridge magnet I did for the Cafe Gargoyle, though it's also stuck in terms of reproduction. Next to him you can see a picture of my lovely wife.

Here's one I did for her that hangs over the stove. The face is my first attempt to duplicate a person's face; harder than the faces of random creatures, where they sort of tell you what they want to look like, but easier than I was worried about:

Some more fridge magnets, along the heart-with-wings theme. Here I've got a little theme going: the second one is a brain-with-wings. I sent these to various people, some of whom didn't quite get the brain thing.

This one I call the Sad Monk, but it's really titled Lamentation for the Art of War. I do wargames for the military, you see.