I will not insult your intelligence by claiming I don't know where my ideas come from. Of course I know where. You know I know. So why does this pleasant fiction pass so easily between us? Why does the artist lie in this manner so habitually? More tellingly, why lie when the cant is so transparent? I know you know the answer, but I trust your discretion. It is a gentleman’s agreement between us. (We are all gentleman here, right?)

But I do not write to question this gentleman’s agreement but to praise it. Rather let us consider together the imbedded assumption implicit in the question. Namely those ideas come from some unspecified place and the mind itself functions as a landscape. It is as though thoughts and desires travel through this mental scenery like pilgrims. If thought itself is spatial in character, could then, all mental constructs be somehow sculptural?

Let us assume for the moment that the mind is a kind of landscape with a topography whose features can be mapped. Yes, the terrain maybe mapped by some enterprising Michelin guide but what do we see when we lift our heads from our two-dimensional approximation? What would this landscape look-like? Doubtlessly like our scenery, an urban street on an overcast day, in which the buildings, the chrome bumpers, the storefronts, the grade schoolers’ notebooks and the sky above are just variations of a seamless milky gray. The traffic on a overcrowded road is slowly moving out of earshot, leaving us alone with the taste of coming snow…

Perhaps a map or a city is at once too obvious and too grand a metaphor for 10 or so pounds of noodly flesh we call the brain. Perhaps this muddy terrain is just the perceptional raw material with which to press and mold into clever shapes. Ideas are baked in an electrochemical kiln like so much mind-clay. Maybe this emotional/intellectual fire transforms our porous perceptions into the odd terra-cotta urns that hold our little watery thoughts.

ABG