Not exactly te expected post for today

Today I wanted my entry to be about our visit to the Marc Chagal exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a museum, if you have not seen, I can highly recommend. It was going to include pictures and of course my musing, but scheduling did not permit (the museum staff did not get the memo of our eminent arrival and so did not open specially for us on Monday.)  Here would have been thoughts on his work, his use of color and bold strokes, the tragedies of his life, and even the story of how my grandmother met his daughter in Israel right after his death. But that will all have to wait.

Instead I am going to pull from a presentation I made, many moons ago, on our topic to a group of grade schoolers and their teachers.  It has some philosophical basis and I think may even speak in small part to inspiration.

We all know the old unanswerable question, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it does it make a sound?”  Now, I have personally answered the similar question “If a tree limb falls out of the park and lands on you new VW in the middle of the night does it make a sound?” The answer to this is of course yes; it wakes you up from a sound sleep. This I know, I can still show you the dents.  Arguably this was one of the most inspirational moments of my career.  It was this tree limb that became the legs for my kitchen table and began the use of the live oak branches that have become important in many of my designs.

Inspiration is a hard won prize, I wrote a poem way back in the day, it is not an Hiku but perhaps it should have been.  I used it at the beginning of every reading: 

      “When the MUSE STRIKES!

          It rings a bell,

          Or lights a light

          And sometimes…

          It bashes you in the head with a poem.”  Or drops a tree branch on your car.  Michael Blake, best know for his novel “Dances with Wolves”, shook my hand over that one.  He seemed to think that I had “nailed” some distilled essence in those few lines.  He was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the movie was made; the muse really is one tough bitch.

But back on topic, “…does it make a sound?” or a corollary which might be “…if no one is around does it even exist?”  My daughter, 12, seems to think that if you are not thinking about it than no it does not exist for you.  So do we as individuals “create” our own experiences everyday merely by thinking about them?  I think therefore I am. Or, must we have some tangible interaction with our surroundings in order for them to exist and by extraction for us to exist? If I can’t see it, touch it, smell it, it is not real.  Is that why we, you, create?  Making tangible produce so that you can prove you are real?  Or perhaps we, you, create in order to bring a thought in to existence and know that there is now something of us, you, that exists beyond you, us.  In the latter the tree does make a sound and in the former it does not. All of which my daughter says makes her head hurt.

I really do look forward to your creative views.  I have change around some of the blog settings so that it should be possible to post comments now, as some of you have mentioned was a problem.  Please let me know if the problem persists.  The only input I have gotten so far is “recommend u rethink the blog” which I am sure that I should, but the plan is make a post everyday for a while just to see if the thing has any legs to stand on and if not…

Stay tuned.

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