Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Image of Humanity?

First, the important things a planned preliminary trip that I could not make might have enabled me to say on alumni night:

Alumni night was a particulary emotional and wrenching confrontation with the past. Russell Adams seemed to be in the same rugged health as the day we dug that ditch. A similarly arrogant defiance of mother nature--an hour's discussion in the midday sun, humbled and exhausted me--or perhaps that happened 30 years ago. I thought on seeing his slides: those of our era were intimate with bedrock, the literal foundation of the city. Bob Williams, Roger Tomalty, Bob Walker, Chris Blackwell, and other Project leaders of the first buildings dug holes in some very tough ground. My fondest memory of the late Skip Sagar was looking up at him with a beatific smile from a 15 foot hole excavated for the footing of the souteast cornrer of the second vault. He expressed his wish to trade places with me, this wise and patient couselor to a small town hick and benefactor from the Jewish community of New York City. Of such moments of poiniant spontanaity was the project begun. The dust and hardness abrasive . the dynamite of Mr. Bennett, so fascinating to us intellectuals and art students, of 90 pound air hammers drilling into mother earth, the vibrations locked in my genetic memory forever, for anchoting those heavy buildings on fractured basalt poured out molten in prehistory. I have tears now writing this. That I could have summoned these words, completely spent from travel and sleeplessness on alumni night. The rock there broke the blades of the largest conventional bulldozers in the world, the Caterpillar D-9, and Paolo's beloved Komatsu, and the site weldor would be summoned to repair and reinforce them.


Does everyone have those personal epiphanies and sensual impressions? How does one evoke reading a poem from from a workshop lover, complete with artwork that nailed the highest view of oneself to which one could possibly aspire in this world in a few lines: "He tries to build a heaven here on earth...dear friend with the clear white light..."I would not trade my remaining copy of that page for anything on earth.  How does one communicate the meaning of one day under the restaurant, in front of one of the largest workshops, gathered to hear Paolo in our weekly encounter, having him ask me to "warm up" the group? The greatest honor of my life, of any life lived in our age, offered for the first time to anyone.

Hearing oneself broadcast for an uninterrupted hour in the great city which first inspired me to seek the city as the highest design form, and Paolo as its central figure? What mattered are the poems of children given to me after a class with catholic schoolchildren, in the same Octagon where Roger hurled a full can of Moosehead at me teaching an experimental Friday Night class. Ah, there are stories to tell...of workshop loves upon which the world seemed to depend, and those urequited...to stand in celebrated nakedness.


I welded mostly without a shirt, wearing shorts, and let the white hot sparks of molten slag, and the radiation of the 7000(?) degree arc burn my sun browned nordic skin. One time, arc welding the old batch plant with only googles, all the skin peeled off my face the next day.