For the sake of clarity let’s say that there are two kinds
of people. I’m the kind of person who likes to connect the dots. I like to make
sense. I like to explain things. The other kind of people want stories. They
want characters and a drama. Funny is good.
I know this because I walk a lot. My path usually takes me
downtown, and among other places, I walk past Louise’s and the Harbor Lights.
They’re a couple of bars, in Lawrence, Kansas. It is clear that people go into
these places to sit and drink, but more than that, they’re there to talk.
Looking in, I imagine that my explanations would cause most people’s eyes to
glaze over. I suspect that they’re the kind of people who are more interested
in a good story.
Well, the world is not the clear place that I’ve started out
describing here. If nothing else, I’m more than one of those two kinds of
people myself, as are everyone else, apparently. But explanations at least give
us the illusion of things making sense, but ‘please, sir, could I have some
more?’ – stories.
Mr. Dickens told stories. Mary Poppins understood that a
spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down. My instinct is to connect the
dots, but in the end, I want to see the whole picture, just like you do.
So let me tell you a story.
I have a piece of art on the wall in my dining room – a
mosaic made of broken bits of pottery. The dominant color is a midnight blue
reflecting light over some greens and browns. The grout is light-colored, the
effect is a crackling, as if the universe is fragmented. But when you step back
and I tell you that this work of art is called ‘Night Sky over the Flint Hills’
it all makes more sense.
I see the whole, and more than that, these pieces of glazed
clay fire the places in my mind that have where I have recorded fragments of a
place that is real. I remember a place on a dark stretch of country highway, my
wife and I had pulled off the blacktop onto a gravel stretch of the square-mile
grid and turned off the car lights. We were on our way back from visiting my
parents – they are both gone, now. Highway 150, crossing the Flint Hills is a
short stretch of road –77 cuts across to the west and in thirteen straight miles
east, 50 angles across.
We stepped out of the car into a quiet open space. There was
virtually no other traffic at that hour of the night. Even without waiting for
our eyes to adjust to the dark, we could see the band of spilled milk across
the sky. Above our light-polluted skies in the city at every unaware moment the whole universe spreads out, stars speeding apart, and yet out there at night they
were thick to our upturned eyes – one, a million, a billion, each behind the
next, and then the next - each
individual star’s light shining through space into our eyes. They spread out across the
sky.
Lora, the artist, pulled that image from her memory, and
with a band of speckled dark blue pottery recreated that Milky Way. She was not
with my wife and me on that lonely piece of highway but she represented what I
saw – and not only that night, but other nights. Is all that mostly unseen up
there there, that night sky, that
universe – is it all mere background to my presence?
The stories of my life overlap, they become thick as I look
through them, blending together into a glory that my words only hint at. But
they are particular – of a single piece at a time, but falling into place at times in as real of a kind of sense
as I can know. I first saw this work of art at a show set in a hair salon on a
singular evening. A point in space-time,
as we now say after Einstein. There were cookies and also other mosaics hanging on
the walls. Lora was there. My wife and I were there. We were the stars of this
little drama, I suppose.
Of course, it appears that I’m just playing with words,
although I’m not convinced that that is not what we are doing all the time when
we talk to each other. We are imagining our lives – amidst a whole universe as
solid and burning as a billion billion stars. Of course, we want to make sense
of it all, or only a part of it, if that’s what we can manage.
It took some intervening time, but I made an arrangement
with the artist to have the ‘Night Sky over the Flint Hills’ hang in my dining
room. She and her husband and son dropped by one evening and we hung it on a
hook. My wife had made an almond cake, and we sat around the table talking
mostly of other things. My parents, for one. Up through our ceiling, our roof, up through the urban haze - the Milky Way blazed.
Maybe this isn’t enough drama for you, and I won’t pretend that
I care much if you turn away and get another drink. This is my story. And whatever
you think about art or me, the art that I care about connects me to the stories
of my life – the people I’ve known and the places I’ve been. Besides the whole
glorious universe, what else is there?
