BY JAN HAAG
CONSIDER SLOW COOLING
11-30-97
"I made my first sculpted
human figure from five different metals. But when I had finished welding
it together, I took the hot metal out into the cold winter air and the
whole thing contracted at different rates. It flew apart in my hands.
That was my lesson in slow cooling. There was no saving it. It flew into
hundreds of pieces."
Harold Schwarm
Hmmmmm, Devayani,
five
metals,
hot to cold,
contraction at different rates,
leaping back
to stasis,
it'll shatter in your hands.
Consider the surprise
element.
White snow all around,
a hot new sculpture in your
hands,
the frigid air like God's fist
shattering it into
drifts.
Consider the sound, popping
and hissing, cracking
and
still small shieks in the stillness
of an early dawn dedicated
to
creation. Explosion!
Consider the smell, the ice-fresh
dawn,
the sun contemplating its rise, the scent of sun rays,
the
bare, structural trees, standing,
their odorless limbs angular to their
trunks,
sap gone to their roots.
Consider the taste: Hot metal
even in
the kitchen has a taste of over-ripeness,
enriched.
Chruuuuuuaaang! The smell/taste
is gone, melting like daggers
in
the snow, the taste of feathery water.
Consider the touch, hot in
your gloves --
you must have been wearing gloves.
How hot can a
statue be --
while being transported into
glacial conditions?
You can touch the fragments,
but not the whole.
Before the
fire there was belly,
buns, arms and legs,
a noble head, texture
like a human skin.
It stood in your hands for a few
moments,
maybe longer. Out of the fire, on to the ledge,
or the
floor, you watched it while putting on
your overcoat in the hot/frigid
air of the foundry.
It wasn't very big on the ground, the dirt
floor.
You fingered it with fleecy gloves, thick
leather on the
outside.
Take it home! You're tired of the heat,
of the sweat of
creation.
You stoop, retrieve --
O Devayani, watch this!
--
walk down the hall,
push open the great double
doors,
grateful the foundry isn't yours.
Someone else will damp down
the furnace,
douse the lamps needed to illunimate the
cavernous
space even in the day.
You've got a human figure
now;
you feel you could slip through the molecules
of the door
without opening it,
but settle for a conventional exit.
Your
genius is in the work. The conception.
Thud! Explosion! Your hands
are flung out
and crumpled in,
there's a hit in the belly.
By
the time you worry about your eyes,
the fragments are skidding on the
ice
of the walkway that brought you empty-handed in
and will take
you empty-handed out,
the ice air like fire in your
lungs.
Should you pick up the pieces
like shovel slashes in the
snow?
You made a human figure,
O Devayani, did you see the human
figure?
-- attracting the fog
in the frigid air,
condensing
the light,
feel its response to the freedom of the world,
the air,
the breath of existence! --
exploding in the snow.
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
Arizona Desert
George Coluzzi
I Am Innuit
McDonald Observatory
Crossing the Country
BY JAN HAAG