In the summer roadtrip
after graduating
we went West and from Vancouver
I looked South
to the job waiting by the Bay,
flying wind turbines. I had this photo
of a bird dark against blue sky
with a smaller silhouette behind it:
this was the turbine, flying itself,
buzzing like an insect
playing like a raven in the wind:
that was my interest, wild artifacts,
and in the Vancouver Museum
of Anthropology I found them:
canoes, paddles, bentwood boxes
painted with curving lines forming
eyes and animals, wings and scales
recursing within each other, tiling
every surface, disorienting me
at first, then it connected: this paint
and carving, so integrated with
the form of function as to be
a view into it, an evoking
of wood's wildness, but also a
language aesthetic of its own,
a recognition of the precise
channeled wilderness of artifice
and creation, was a synthesis,
but not synthetic: hybridized: inspired:
and driving to Washington I saw echos
of eyes within eyes within wings within birds
on highway ashphalt and overpass poles,
those gray surfaces designed to
slide off the mind, but what if all
that concrete jungle
was staring back at us
as a wilderness of craft and art
requiring respect,
and awareness of the object reality:
motion is not needed
for us to feel presence;
robotics is not essential
to tools that exist for themselves.