and visualizing my location, and if today I were asked to recreate that boy in his grandfather’s welding hood, I would drop a five gallon bucket over my head and navigate around the room to everyone’s enjoyment, but my father would not find it funny, he would consider it silly and degrading, a man with a bucket over his head, why? I can even hear, in my mind, his protest to this subjunctive construct.
I wore this same hood at twelve, when, in a long-sleeve flannel shirt and blue jeans, wearing gloves so big on my small hands that I could barely grip the whip, I stood beside my father in his heavy work shirt tucked into his dungarees, in his worn boots and wide leather belt, in his turned-around baseball cap and welder’s hood, and listened to him, like a novice listening to a master artist, teach me how to weld. And it all seemed doable, the process he displayed seemed possible, seemed simple; but, with the hood down, I could not see to start the arc, and sparks jumped whenever the rod inadvertently made contact with the metal plate, and after many false attempts, I eventually pushed the rod forward into where I guessed the weld should be, and magically the opaque lens of the hood turned transparent against the triumphant white light of the arc I was creating, and in that glorious light I became spellbound, mesmerized, narcissistic. Afraid of ruining the moment, I did not draw the rod across the plate: I feared that any movement of my hand, any attempt to direct the magical arc I had created, would only break the connection. Then there were too many sparks, the arc was not advancing, I was not drawing the light down a line, I was frozen, burning through the metal, the hum was not there, and I pulled the rod off the plate and all went black again. When I lifted my hood, a dastardly hole large enough for my ring finger to slip through, glowing hot at the edges, peered back at me like Oedipus’ gouged socket––repulsive, abnormal, sickening: I had ruined the plate, abused the canvas. When my father did it, the hum and the crackling were melodious, the rod’s constant contact with the plate lit the stage and the black curtain was lifted, and in wonderment I watched the molten line he created, and saw the theatrical nature of his performance. I reached a second time for the whip and again I could not advance the arc once struck, again there was only the chaotic shower of sparks which allowed me to see that metal stage, upon which my father so masterly performed, only in glimpses. Again I burned through the plate. A third time, a third lewd hole, tears of frustration rolled down my face in lines, and I was ashamed to lift my hood. I dropped the whip. The rod popped loose and rolled across the concrete floor. My father lost his patience, and it was on that one chilly Saturday morning, beside the portable welder in the garage, that my mettle was tested, and I failed, and, now, with my awards and honors framed on the wall in my cluttered office, with my academic accomplishments and artistic successes, I can not help but think back on that day as the day I realized that I would never be a man, the day I realized that all my accomplishments from there on out would be nothing but the contrived conveyance of self-assurance within an insecure world of intellectual ramblings, assurance that what I am doing is good, is honorable, is dignified, when deep down I know it is not. My father attached metal plate to metal plate. He built things. He looked at what he did, not as the work of art that it was, but as a task, an assignment, a responsibility, and now I go to
museums and look at work without function, work which we teach ourselves to appreciate, but which has not the intrinsic value of the industrial production, work which was created by people like me who not only make it, but can also articulate why it should be accepted as valuable. Yet, Harvey would want to know how the nude sculpture on my coffee table advances the world, and he would not accept my aesthetic theory, he would object to art, not because he would not see its beauty, but because he would not understand its departure from work, he would not understand beauty without function, and like primal beings, he is the more spiritual, he is the one who would call for, who would insist upon, a union between art and life––a destruction of barriers––who would detest the entire abstract notion of going to
an art museum, and deep down I think he would be right, and deep down I know that all those men in all those dilapidated mills, in all those cruddy shops, in all those greasy garages, are the real artists, under appreciated, unsung, and I know that all I and all those like me are simply commentators who cannot see through the dark green lens of a welding helmet and strike the arc.
Once the shop closed, my father never worked again. The union offered him an itinerant position, but he turned away from the trade. The noisy shop that Harvey blamed on his forgotten memory was gone, and no longer could my father hear the clanging of sheet metal echoing around those brick walls and those cracked and mottled concrete floors, never again could he nod his head and drop his hood and become, not my father, but a worker, an artist, a man in an industrial mask; and now, beside Harvey’s hood in my father’s garage, like the beginning of a collection of African art, my father’s hood hangs on a sixteen penny nail, and, in a way, forms the only connection he had to Harvey.
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