How Hot is That Flame
As someone who cooks, the transition from a gas stove to an induction cooktop is challenging.
A couple of weeks ago Amanda Petrusich wrote an article for the New Yorker about the band Phish. It's a poetic and comprehensive flyover about the audience, the bandmates, their history as Vermont locals who tour the globe serially selling out huge venues. It's almost a structure, the colossus of sound, belief, and affection that brings together a wildly diverse community. At the heart of her prose is the axis around which the circus spins -- The Portal -- a slice of space/time in which transcendence occurs. (And just by the by, I sold a 4' x 8' piece of my art named "The Portal" in December to a client who has it in a nice collection in Dallas). Amanda's metaphor of a doorway, a crossing of a threshold to another plane, references back to "The Doors of Perception", a book by Aldous Huxley published in 1954 discussing his experiences with mescaline. The phrase is lifted from a poem by William Blake written in 1793 -- "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite". These notions can be readily discounted by the portion of the population who have never been to a Phish show. Cosmic woo woo, smoked brains, too many shrooooms... step-children of the Grateful Dead... But if you have been to Madison Square Garden or the Sphere when the Portal opens, (and I have), there is an event, a moment that could be thirty seconds or twenty minutes in which the people around my seat levitate. They grin and dance. The music soars. They leave behind their jobs, their car that has started making a strange noise, their annoying boss, an under-performing portfolio or its non-existence, the frantic media of impending doom and they join the BAND. They visibly become a unity, a collective of brothers and sisters bound in the moment. They belong. Together. Right here. Right now. We ARE, with the explicit/implicit notion of "We."
In 1444, Thomas à Kempis, wrote the phrase "sic transit Gloria Mundi" which translates "thus passes the glory of the world." I came across the phrase somewhere years ago and wrote it in Sharpie on one of my work tables. It stared back at me for years. I made a triptych last year, three panels with the names "Time", "Space", and "Everything Else", and titled the whole shebang "Gloria Mundi". I wanted to focus on the "glory of the world" aspect and leave out the "thus passes" part. I sold it to a client who was finishing up a guest house project. I got to enjoy these panels on the walls of the gallery until last week when I installed them in their new home. Though sad to see them depart, I am thrilled with their presentation as I got to build a lighting system to optimize the artwork night and day. The phrase "sic transit Gloria Mundi" has been used for the last 600 years in the coronation of every pope.
The heart of this is the collective -- people want to belong. Humans need tribes. And they need to step outside, to give over to the team, to let go. They want a sense of release and we want to do it together. We want to be in groups. Scrolling Instagram or Facebook is really only fun when you share the fun stuff. Social media is alone time, until you share. I live in Red Sox nation, a collective with history and glory and miracles and songs and icons and holy ground. Warriors, Cavaliers, football or football, rugby, cricket or the church of MOMA, Monet, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Mecca, Paris... Choose.
Induction stoves make less indoor pollution but I have friends who recently built homes and were each insistent on their choices. One, a life-long chef and foodie, went with gas. The other, a devout environmentalist and foodie, went electric. Choose your group. A billion plus Catholics are a global mass of humanity bound by their beliefs. Every day I am mesmerized by the way light moves, the fierce orange-yellow from the glass furnaces next door to my studio, the slow liquid reflections on the windless lake, the iridescence of refraction on my artwork, the sky of a Vermont spring behind those blossoming cherries on Home Avenue.
I sold a big piece of art to one of the dudes who are Phish. It's what one is confronted with walking into his recording studio on the lakeshore. I can only hope they and their crew can find a moment of levitation in what I do. Wavelengths are my notes too. Near-death experiences are always recounted as approaching the light. Might as well approach it today too. Glory of the World, yes please...
