|
I remember the crazy pleasure of standing in puddles, and
that great desire to animate all dead things. I remember in the summer heat, blowing on
flies and expecting them to believe winter had returned. I remember that disturbing
feeling, believing grown-ups could see my thoughts. These first experiences which we so
intensely felt had sometimes real meaning. And when the meaning was too deep to explain,
this would then become our magic. As we grow older and taller we do seem to forget this
magic and some of our original truths. Most creation that withstands the destruction of
time and man, seems to have a common unity of simplicity and belief. Ways of life,
religions, myths, folk art, poetry, music, farmer's tools, chairs and tables and what's
upon them, children wherever they are on earth, -- all have for me a strong relationship,
especially in their primitive manifestations.
Our adult reality is a world of precarious balance, with knives and forks, and some
fingers still in use, with all the ingenious complexity of today's machinery and some
still carrying burdens, with men and women who have split the atom and released stores of
energy, and with those who still wait for rabbit's foot luck and misfortune to rain from
umbrellas open in the house.
We are all of us similar creatures drawn to different things. Some like it hot and some
like it cold. Some are fond of the primitive and some prefer the modern. And there are
those of us who like it both hot and cold. But those original realists, the children, a
part of primitive mysteries, are for me the most exciting examples of that curious balance
that turns the world, like the machinery of a watch, the parts of a flower, architecture
and design, even the love and hate of man.
|
