In the art
room with Ms Alice, we had the class I was subbing doing clay. The art room is
a new thing, a whole room dedicated to getting messy, all the regular school
day stuff cleared away to make room for only creative, open, living mess.
Finally a room I understand.
Dubious,
though, because twenty five 6 year olds with lumps of wet clay… It would be
dubious with one 6 year old with a lump of clay. The amount of squish, and
disaster and tragedy if it goes wrong and mess.
But Miss
Alice is in charge, and she’s from Kentucky, all that blue grass, and she is
artistic and yet strong, if she says we can do it, so I can merge into her and
we can play these kids like our band, lopsided maybe, but clay can always be
lumped back together and started over.
So we’re
flattening clay into a little rectangle, there’s a paper with a large rectangle
drawn on and they get to try and flatten their piece to the shape of the rectangle.
There’s a clean paper for everyone. There’s water you can dip your fingers into
to soften your clay. There’s a little wooden tool at each place for cutting,
soft, light wooden knife like the kind Indians would carve carefully.
Most of the
kids flatten their clay and try and reach the edges of the rectangle. Two of
the kids just keep putting on water until they have a soggy lump and they just
keep squeezing it and squeezing it. Keith does this. Of course he does this, he
is the smallest kid in the class, he is smart but his youth is busy, the wiring
zapping his body around to do things and say things and be all things at once.
He is the most annoying, and perhaps the most still growing directly from the
ground, zinging upwards. Annoying because he requires the most tending,
fencing, reining in. Fork in the light
socket, because what would happen if?
We get the
rectangles flattened, and then we press an insect mold into it, push hard, make
fossil type impressions. They will become butterfly feeders, to hang on the
fence, to collect dew for butterflies to land on and drink. It doesn’t matter
what they are, or if they are perfect, or what is perfect with lumps of clunky
clay hanging on a fence. What matters is, is the making fun, does it feel good,
are you seeing yourself in the result, are you part of something bigger,
creation.
I’m cleaning
off little clay covered hands, and looking over at Keith who has to have his
redone because he made the biggest mess. The majority of kids are getting their
pieces to hang on the fence, lining up, chattering, like normal kids do. I hear
Ms Alice saying Keith, I know you used
the most water and added it to your clay and we made a little bit of a mess,
but what that means to me is maybe you are an artist. Artists like to feel
things. The free thinking Ms Alice, she can name things and see things
others can’t. My heart breaks a little, because Ms Alice says the one thing
that has flowered, and burdened my life forever. The feeling of things.
I don’t have
to look at Keith to know he is up to his elbows in white clay, and that his
clay is still a ball of complete goo in his hands and that he is squishing it.
He is six and he won’t remember this day or this mess or the details of this
room. He doesn’t have to worry about the 24 other kids or the fence waiting for
us to put the clay on, or dinner to make, or working on his marriage. He is
feeling the clay, because that feels good, and that is it.
The most
annoying kid because he’s the one fully invested. I take them out to the fence,
try to funnel them to the next step and they are all fairly responsible, some
squabbles. But we are all these firings of thought and feeling and daylight and
planes flying overhead and butterflies lofting past at random moments. Groups
of children are impossible, unless they are singing.
I go to bed
that night thinking about what Ms Alice said, in the middle of her work day. We
aren’t getting paid that much, and there is so much chaos, and the neatness of
the art room became the mess of the art room, but her thought was pure, and our
art came out the way art comes out, okay, smashed, lumpy, funny, twisted.
Occasionally we get the pure moment, in the midst of the chaos, of the most difficult
person, with his arms wet with white mud, and his clay slobby and nowhere near
successful or finished, and yet that’s what we’re doing it for, not the result.
The experience.
Fork in the
toaster. What would happen if. Maybe we don’t need death, exactly. But curiosity.
Curiosity is science, and art, and thought, and living.
