Ugh y Inspiration

Dave and I came back from Chicago the walking wounded, practically.

Dave came back with a pinched nerve in his neck that sent him to the urgent care center for x-rays and steroids and muscle relaxants. And just as he was starting to get better, I threw my back out.

Yes, it pretty much had to happen.

Yesterday I just rolled out of bed in the morning like always and found myself with so much pain emanating from my lower back that I could barely make it to the bathroom and back to bed. That's never really happened to me before. (Yay for first-time experiences.)

I try to never, ever take even otc drugs, but after suffering for several hours I finally decided that I had to have some ibuprofen. It took the edge off enough that I could get in the shower and let hot water run over my back for a while which also made it feel a little better.  As soon as the ibuprofen wore off though, I was right back to hobbling about in pain. So I'm keeping up on the ibuprofen and on bed rest.

Fun.

Meanwhile, here's the last of the Chicago trip:

Chicago had a few things to offer, inspiration-wise, mostly at the Field Museum and the Chicago Art Institute:


 

 
 


But the best thing I saw in any museum (or anywhere) in Chicago was this:



Charles Ray's Hinoki at the Chicago Art Institute.
 
What is this thing and why did it delight me?

Here's part of the description written by Ray:

"Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off the highway. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log, but to my eyes, it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen decades earlier.[. . .]With several friends, I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki)."

Yes, that's right, it's a fallen tree faithfully reproduced by carving it out of another kind of tree altogether. The carving apparently took several people carving for several years to complete and it is expected (by Mukoyoshi) to last 1,000 years.

But that's just the amazing surface detail of the experience of seeing this thing. The other parts of the experience were no less thrilling. First, you can smell this thing long before you come to the gallery where it resides. It's got living smell to it somehow, unfamiliar in an art gallery. And you can feel the changes that it makes to the quality of the air around it. It increases the humidity.  It apparently affects lots of things around it, including the floor it rests on, which had to be reinforced when it started to buckle as a result of the weight and moisture.

I know that little floor factoid from talking to one of the security guards who watches over this piece, keeping people from touching it all day long. The poor man's gone a little...off...in part from being in contact with this thing all day, I think. I won't go too much into it, as he was the least interesting part of the experience to me, but he was full of little tidbits that aren't part of the formal description of the piece. For example, he told us about talking to one of the members of the artist's family who revealed that the artist had kept back for himself several sections of the carving. And he also said something that I wanted to pass on, as it is something that too often we forget about when we're looking at art.

He said, "As much I look at it, it looks at me, too."

There is no way around that knowledge except forgetting, is there?

(If I had the kind of personality that led me to do such things, I'd already be plotting about how to steal that tree and move it into our little casita so that I could wake up next to it every day.)