To an end,

For it,

To tomorrow, pathetic,

Not surface but landscape, to get it in getting it to have hold yet not to know

For me to know for you to try but not ever really know,

In these things in these plastic things for landscape, to try to know.

For the country and the idea to go there and try to.

For inertia in inertia and so that’s it

For the last great adventure.

So that is decided then,

we will make some sculpture,

5 pieces,

that is a body, limbs from a body. The body is the tool, there are fragments of tools to work from,

to put to work.

A show is something else,

what is selected from a group of limbs/fractions.

A section, a golden section, release a knot select a section, a group of sections.

1 on one, toe to toe, shoulder length, arms length. Select a tool, select arms length. A mode of 5 things, things that are fingers to a hand.

That makes a fist. A fist holds or releases, could it punch? What is it to punch, motion forward.

Let me see a point to sharpen this, feel the sharp point of a limb, a thing, a medium group. This is a plain, maybe a foundation, what is in it, what is underneath it.

select things to make, to make a motion forward, to make something beautiful. A second made by a hand,

gesture is loose and a limp gesture is nothing, it’s a note, it’s a note. A note is not a gesture it’s more, it sticks and remains in the kiln.

Bring the heart down over the head, climb in to hide or maybe to shield, to shield is alive! If only for yourself to feel truly free In safety.

Lets go to work on this, lets go forward, not project, but really move onto the next one,

the next one is one from history.

From history we get a sense now, of things.

From a circumference we find a center. To go drawing in public.

To My Dear Maurice,

The world is loud and I will speak softly for you, I know you will hear me as I speak from a place that I feel is close to your ear.

We live in a many faceted world, largely one where each face of the diamond requires a large amount of attention. This modern life requires a mind that can assess these points of focus and choose the correct stance by which to respond, verbally and indeed thoughtfully. So you see there is indeed a possibility that this letter was meant for you to read but equally, and maybe more importantly, it was meant for me to write.

The act of putting in ink my thoughts from this vista has been a long and curious road for me to walk, but rest assured there have been many previous incarnations of these verses, and the fact that this is the version you are now reading is worthy of note and of significant importance to me. It also seems important for me to say that the frame of mind you are in for witnessing what I write may require some patience, a virtue I to have been placing many hours in realising its importance. Whilst you may not agree with all I say it is important to be less strict with the text than your own thoughts as I do not presume to know your poetic religion.

If we are to learn we must begin with the past. History is a knowledge acquired by investigation and so it is logical to begin with where we have been. Many now teach to be present, or to forget knowledge of a past that isn’t valuable, which in turn is to be without prejudice, completely.

This I feel to be an individual task and one that yields unique rewards which is dependent wholly on environment. Yesterday I was over there, today I am here; should I leave yesterday to yesterday and forget the trip I have taken? Presence is but one element of what has passed, what will pass and what is now.

All these are in constant and unpredictable flux.

All require a certain awareness of ones body and the space we sit in. what has passed and what is to come are imaginary, what is now is only ever the most fleeting of feelings. You see dear friend, as each moment of now moves into what was, it becomes a trace, and defines us in only so much as a walk taken on a line. How much this line is important is an individual quest and not one for mass.

Oh how I love who I am in this precious second. The bird plans his nest as the tree grows to seed and plans the future of future trees, both are important pursuits, and are for mass.

You are an artist, I know this much, although the environment of an artist is a place to feel free, we use this to understand inspiration to make something for this world.  We know the world will be a more interesting place because of the making of it and we learn how to annunciate and speak more clearly about who we are and why we are here.

Secondly you are a sculptor. A sculptor is a unique being. A maker of objects; objects who stand by our side and shoulder to shoulder with our character. Through this we hold up a mirror to our country and our physical world. We do not challenge our families, instead we add to them, and in every act of making puts us alongside the stature of what it is to be mother and father.

Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, we are dreamers. To dream is to create in a world not of our physical own and not where our feet are grounded, but where our inspiration lays and sleeps. When we dream we create worlds, worlds that don’t need to be built to be physical. I live in my dreams, I can fly above mountains and dive into seas. I can send messages and know they are delivered before I’ve finished thinking them. They are the places beyond places, a third place of creation and in dreams all belongs to us.

For it is with love we shall meet, with dreams in our eyes, with the elegant pressures of the sun and moon.

What wonders are before us? It is the dreamers who will win, the dreamers are god and know truth in their dreams. Let us speak with the birds and our opponents; let us ask of them their dreams, for it is the softness of dreamers who greet us here. This life, you see, is but a moment of love and love endures so hear me when I say to you, listen between words and struggle not to hear the silence of pauses, in those moments are where you’ll find me, in times between times and on the edge of the moon and for that I love you.

I know my dreams and in that I know all things ever dreamt, let us meet here for a while for without our bodies we know lightness, without our feet we know flying and without hands we know to taste. The leaf will always reach for the sun, yet the sun will move to find its setting place and make way for the moon. Does not the leaf then search for the moon? When moons and suns and leafs collide, there my friend, is the end of this world and the beginning of the next. Without independence we would find their personalities muddied by the impression they leave in our vision.

For all you know to be true, let us feel our way through and around this subject of mass.

Firstly let us take a walk together through how we learn about mass and its place. As children the world is new. We are given a licence to expand as much as our guardians and teachers let us. We are pointed at experience, we gauge perspective on quantity, time and emotion.

Later we learn about velocity, and begin to build an opinion on what we can trust. This, in turn, leads to mistrust and disloyalty. We test ourselves and are tested. Some important lessons are presented to us and we either decide to remember this or dispel them from memory.

Later still, we travel the Roman road of stability accompanied by anxiety refining our opinion, procuring others and inventing further ones. Towards the end we get ready to say goodbye to all we know of the physical parameters of mass, weight and motion. We resign to the idea that we will soon give way to new spatial elements such as memory and solemn emotions, which solidify before turning gaseous and evaporate into the axis between plane and plan.

To know… ah yes, to really know, was the only goal. It wasn’t a particularly ill grasp of a tongue or a unique place in the heart of the earth that drove me to this feeling. It was perhaps through the realisation that the organisation of movements between the sea, the earth and the stars, really and quite wonderfully revolve around a man standing tall on the deck of his boat.

This lead me to think that all nature is perfectly so, and was to be a guide for my pen as spring is to winter.

The dragonfly has a momentary mind. He wishes as he does and is joyful in his knowledge that the downness of things is as pure and as relevant as the upness and the sideness. His drunk loops imitate the wind and hold the secret to his elegant existence.

An ocean wave is a jovial fellow, a man of great knowledge of his family, of space and of progress. He is cyclical and squarely loyal to the shore in his welcoming dance. Only his brothers know his unique soul, yet it is only us who pretend to now his surface.

I look to the faint heart of the butterfly and wonder, how his leafy exterior is as fragile as autumn and spring. I see him as wind without knowledge of tide or moon, but answer me this. I ask him, ‘how does the reflection of your wing command your flight so? Your mass is a negative one, lighter indeed than the sky you fall through. If you are to exist at all then surely your colour comes from some unknown prism and your progress from the sound of light breaking on it.’

The butterfly talks about a line, only it is one that fades.

I have been learning to listen to the moments of quiet in-between the spoken words of a conversation. These moments coupled with the words result in every conversation really being two conversations; what is said and what is left out. It would be as though every novel written was two books; every song had twice the music, and for every intake of breath there was twice the expulsion. The emphasis for me is that this is a means to listen and to listen to. It is what I have tried to do here, that is, as much emitting a verse from my hand and in the moment that ensues, a stillness.

It all comes from intention, when I intend a permanent thing it remains with me from that moment, and as clear as when it was first conceived. The line itself is strong and it joins, like time, two points in my memory from intention to physical act. What remains all become as permanent signs of creation.

You hold permanence too closely and in too high a regard. In that exquisiteness we can miss the progression one would discover in letting the motion be itself permanent only for a time.

Watch as the clouds become clouds. Watch as they have no care for a permanent form and relax into the viscous rain which so enjoys falling. The clouds and the men who build them know the purpose of their song and enjoy the sky if only for the time they occupy it. Treat the canvas like the sky and you will find that what is permanent is your hand daubing the field with intention, not the resulting colour array. Your memory of that moment is the only moment that can hold these thoughts.

The more I sit here the more time I have to look, I taught of essence yet I missed colour.

‘Was it enough?’ I asked you once, you said ‘it is never enough, until the last moment … then it is enough’.

There was once an alchemist whose attempts to turn lead in to gold were failing.

Try as he might and with all the work he produced no gold.

He pleaded with his peers to borrow some gold to buy lead and the potions he needed to try thew process one more time. He promised to payback double whomever lent him the gold, and still they said all said no.

Dejected and lost he returned to his workshop and went on with his work with what gold he had left. As he worked a spider with a sack of gold appeared and said to the alchemist, ‘whilst I catch flies, I want to catch more flies that any other spider, I have eight legs but I wish for more so as to be faster. I will take your offer to double what I have.’

So the alchemist worked night and day and completed his experiments. The spider returned to him for his reward, of twice what he had. Upon realizing that the gold had gone but and the alchemist could not give him the speed he wanted, the spider spun a web over the cauldron so the alchemist could work no more. As he finished the web the spider missed his footing and fell into the cauldron.

He appeared moments later with all his feet burnt and was unable to move at all.

The scale of reflection needed to imagine a mountain as a misshapen clump of cheese is of the same scale and magnitude to the mouse who yearns for the cheese, to resist that temptation in favor of the view from the tip if the mountain.

A man as a pillar is a dog as a cat, if indeed I am to be a mad man, but to be called mad would surely be a promotion. I tell myself if I were truly that then I would not feel so indifferent to my fellow manor the work I do or the money I receive. It is the indifference that makes me mad, not to feel is maddening of empirical proportions. As empires were built on the maddest of ideas and built by great men, are great men then mad and by that account I am the greatest of all. But do not great men feel, maybe more so than others? The columns that hold the sky in place touch not the ground as man does but as a lean-to holds the slate ceiling of today against the rains of tomorrow. And so to law… ah yes that which is true to country and countrymen alike. It is true that any law made should be abided by if one wishes to reside in a place where the law resides. But a man as myself resides not in a single place but in all places, and be it noted that my mind cannot be restricted to sitting down or taking a sides, the matter of where I am requires my body to be seen. And I no longer see my body as a thing but through my mind this vessel called body is a mere transition between permanent and subsequent madness’s. This I see as no reason to abide by any law set forth by a person who is not myself. If law called out to me as a column, and I see no columns here then it is failed in sight. If the law asks me to be a column so as to comply within its constructs then I am the one who decides my fate, so I am law. So you see I am not mad… I understand that which I see and so as to see it as I see it, one must allow myself to move freely not as a support for the sky, not as a column but as a man free to be mad in the blind eyes of any gatekeeper to that which the columns call law.

There was once a clock whose tick and tock were irregular. He began to worry as he though that if he could not fulfil his duties his owner would get rid of him. As he sat on he shelf a pig trotted in looking happy and content. The clock talked to him about his worries and asked the pig why he was so happy.  The pig said, ‘well I am able to do what the farmer asks of me. He feeds me and I eat, he gives me shelter in which I sleep and he provides water so that the earth becomes muddy and I can immerse myself, all which bring me great joy.

One day the clock watched as the farmer lead the pig into a shed, from which he never returned. The clock worried about the pig and thought he would never see him again. A few weeks later the farmer was eating sausages on the kitchen. As the clock watched the sausages said to him, even now I am happy as I can still fulfil the farmer’s need, and at that point the clock stopped forever.

Ah yes… when all else is done, when performing is in the dream of the child and the last rabbit has been pulled, only now can I dream of the last great adventure. Of the place where all men meet and talk of times spent living… that is the only adventure I have now. My last trick is that which they used to say of the devil, to prove my existence. ‘Great Alonso’ they used to say, ‘where did that rabbit come from?’ ‘My hat is deep’, is all I used to reply. But they could not know, how they would laugh at me if they knew the truth. I have never found the strength to reach deep enough to find the ark by which all beasts come. Never have I found the lion and the giraffe, nor has the monkey or bear reached for my hand as I reach for theirs. I only ever find a rabbit, and his meagre form is no longer adequate for their amusement. Now you know my failure and I can no longer search for that strength. I will accept a fate dealt to me here and relinquish to the foundry of the heavens any cast made from my soul, and look not for the crown and beast but to the brim and acceptance.

As I sit in this dressing room the sickly sight of this lead paint veneer chokes my nostrils, this humble stool creeks and groans with history, as if a thousand clowns had asked the reflection in the mirror for approval of their craft, and now a fog enters my eyes. The thought occurred to me that if the lights around the mirror had been put out, this scene would be less cheerless, that the gas lamps made ones heart sadder because it lighted it all up. My coat tails look tattered and worn, my face looks grey and my eyes look deep set as if into cavernous holes in my head. What is a magician with only old tricks? The children no longer applaud my successes but instead arrive like grey and purple clouds on my day of sun, obscuring my view of a once glistening horizon. A poet once told me, ‘great artists have no country’ and now that line sticks in my ears as justice to my secret, for there is something I have neglected to say.

I used to know a magic, a magic I was taught by a long line of marvellous magicians who took their knowledge with them when they died. This was a magic that could not be bought by means of this world, not plastic apparitions but real magic. These wonders would provide them with a place in the sky as one of the stars in the black velvet shroud you see at night. You see a magician is not a man like any other, as before he comes onto this world he makes a pact with the sun never to out shine him in they eyes of man and in return when he passes the sun grants him a place in the sky to watch over all the magic of all the universe and to learn all the tricks of man, so that they may shine on for eternity but only in his shadow.

This was the oath I took many years ago. But in my time I forgot that pact, and I broke the promise to the sun when I reached for the lion instead of the rabbit and now the broken man who writes this will not find a place in heaven but will remain in this place as a clown, one to be jeered at and taunted, one to be called ‘the joke’. To me being called a mad man would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent this fate, this audience, they are all dear to me, even when they laugh at me and indeed it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I can join in their laughter not exactly at myself but through my affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as to look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh! How hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth. But they would not understand it; no they would not understand it at all. This is my end and this painted face is all that remains of the Great Alonso.