Yesterday I was painting a difficult ceiling, it was above a stairway and it had a strange curve to it .There was no way to use a ladder and I had no scaffolding, so I took out my telescoping pole and attached my roller to it. The job was going well, but when it came time to cut into the corner where the wall met the ceiling on the curve, the work began to slow down. I had to tape my brush to the pole and slowly, carefully, with great concentration, trace the contour.
Last night as I slept, I dreamt that I had come upon an installation of performance art. A woman sat in a chair behind a low barricade. Leaning against the barricade was a long bamboo pole with one end covered in a soft fabric. I picked up the pole, and with its soft end I traced along the contour of the woman's face, down her long neck to the V shaped depression where it met her upper sternum.
When I awoke my first thought was of blogging and the Internet. It occurred to me that the writing and the reading of blogs was somehow like reaching out and touching someone with a pole.
Poke, poke.
5 comments:
You are so funny. When i saw your title as I waited for the rest to load, I wondered what in the world was coming up, what you didn't want to touch with a ten foot pole. Now I have an image that I'll probably dream about tonight, pictures of all of us out here waving around taped to the top of 10 foot poles, and for some reason...in a big empty swimming pool. Go figure.
Glad you're back!
Hi there Peter. What a job you've done...gosh. Did everything turn out good? Take pics and show us the incredible ceiling.
And that dream....yep sometimes it works like that ;-))))
It's always amazing to me how our inner and outer life combine in the dream-time. Love that ear of corn...:)
a brush tied to a pole, held out-stretched, slowly sliding along the place where horizontal curves meet vertical detours, to cover the old with careful determination...and dreaming of drawing contours and parallels... like the Zen of painting. nice work.
the corn cob takes me home to summer days and holiday times. i am very homesick at the moment. this was a good reminder of one of those small things that i miss.
these words that you have written are the type of words that say exactly what i often feel when i am in the world of blog. i have found that unless you are actively following people closely and regularly, it can become quite a superficial activity... poke poke as you call it. but poke poke can also be that one sentence or image that centres you again. the fact that a "stranger" wrote and posted it becomes irrelevant.
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