Anza Borrego One: The Bloodstone 

 

Hey, how's that for a snappy title, huh? Just like the first installation of some  rocket ship time travel to another futuristic universe way back in the past type of novel: 

" The green skinned judge ran a quick tongue across his lower eyeball, and pronounced sentence on the hapless Earthling, Grank Dawston.

"For the crime of space smuggling, I sentence you to 20 years hard labor in the bloodstone mines on planet Borrego, in the Anza One solar system."

 

 Or maybe a Western.  

 

"O, Mateo, do not go to the Anza Borrego. It is a place muy mal, con  muchos desperados."

" But, I must go, Chiquita Muchacha. When a fortune in bloodstone calls, no man can resist."

But it's just another chronicle of an amateur sculptor doing backyard art.

 

I'm looking at doing these five stones as a single project. Works in a series, I guess. Maybe create an imaginary spiritual narrative around some big theme or other. Each stone represents a different facet of the grand cozmik yoo hoo.

 

 All goofing aside, this is the first "new" alabaster I've bought in a couple of decades, and it does represent a very separate phase in my grand avocation of being a sculptor.  The last four projects were all done with material I bought not long after my wife and I were married, in 2000. A warm-up exercise for this.

I have new stone, new tools, and a still newly ignited burn to work. I've got shapes like silent earworms twisting, and shouting in my head, and I can't turn it off. Don't want to.

 I do know that these five stones are five chunks of prehistoric California, a California that was here before it had a name. This stone slept in the ground while the land above it went from wilderness to the slouching, dystopic mess that remains today.

Now it's in my back yard; in my hands.

Regardless of what my state has become, or will yet become, I'm going to make these five pieces of it into something...

Fuck, I don't know-

 into something I leave behind me when I'm gone.

Like an old song on the radio when the singers are dead.

 

 Which brings me to one of my favorite topics: coincidence.  

 

I'm going to jump back three years, to June of '18.   I had a fragment of a song from the 60's stuck in my head, but for the life of me, I could not remember the title, the words, or who sang it. It was becoming a most annoying ear worm.  I remember talking to one of Mary's friends about it, and she came up with The Mamas and Papas tune, "12:30".  I looked it up on you-tube. That was it! The song was stuck in my head when I set out on this huge adventure.

 

A couple weeks ago, one of the blogs I visit, "The New Neo" , did a post on "12:30".
Here was the song, again, now showing up at Neo's blog, in my daily cruise through the bookmarks. I had to listen once more.

 
 (Here's a video with lyrics)

 

"12:30",  paints a picture of  California at its apex. The kooky, crazy, California hippy sub culture was in full bloom. California was everything that urban America, personified in New York City, was not. We defined cool. Of course, for anyone my age, the scenes in the video spark the memory of having been there.

 They were good times; better than we knew. Now, when I heard the song, the memory of the dream-like cactus trip was woven into the sixties nostalgia. The contrast of how things were, then, with the slouching, filthy, totalitarian mess of how things are, now, just about broke my damn heart. And  I mean the bitter contrast of today with  June of 2018. When I looked all the way back to 1967 I had tears.

 

 Oddly enough, though, getting all misty was not from anger or grief. The tears came from realizing how very fortunate I have been. I was there. I lived that California dream. Surfing, motorcycles, traveling Highway 1, dropping acid in San Francisco... And despite the horror of the last couple years, daily life for Mary and me, and for our friends remains very much intact. I am acutely aware of this, and profoundly grateful. For this one day. The ship may have hit the iceberg, but the water isn't up to our room just yet...The song is stuck in my head again. It's still haunting me. 

 But enough melancholic musing.

 

 

 

Once I got the chunk broken out of the stone it was time for my least favorite parts of the whole game: first, taking down the surface irregularities with the angle grinder. Power tools are loud, messy, dangerous, but fast.

 

Then came the business of deciding how the stone is going to sit. Here's where I have to look at the big flat plane. It would be easy to use the cut as the base. but doing so leaves me with a "mountain" shape, which is static, and not particularly interesting. I want a dynamic, upright composition that will let me bring out the colors and patterns in the stone. There's a lot of very clear stuff in this material, and I want to bring out all the surface area that I can to show it off.

 

Tuesday morning I made a trip to the hardware store, and got new blades for the bow saw. I got the rock mounted up, and strapped down to the table.

I've done the base cut a bunch of times, but this is the first time it didn't come out right. I did not get a clean straight cut, and the stone would not sit flat. Looking back, I can understand what caused the cut to bend. It's a mistake I won't make again. But what should have been a flat plane was bowed out and slightly convex. It took the rest of the day, and some serious hard labor to get a clean, flat bottom started.

 

 The next morning, I figured it would take a couple or three hours to finish getting the base sanded flat. I was wrong. This was a long tough grind, shoving that seventy pound stone back and forth down the sanding board. It took the whole day before I got the bottom where I wanted it to be. Even so, the stone leans back a little farther than I had intended. 

I'm OK with it, though. 

 

 

 

 This is easily the most beautiful material I've ever worked. Look at this. It's part of the slice I took from the bottom. Check out the snow-globe effect in the water-clear matrix, the deep scarlet red running through the clear, also the opal-like milky stuff. 

 

 Whatever I do with it has to be more than special. So here's the blank I have to work with:  I was worried that this stone may be mushy soft like the last two that I worked. No.  This stuff rings. In fact, it's quite hard for alabaster, which is as good a thing as I could ask for. It will hold as sharp a line as I'm willing to cut, and it'll polish up like greased glass. That's why it took so long to get that base flattened down. This is some seriously fine stone.

 

The basic shape is sort of a three sided pyramid with one face machined flat, one face sort of flat, and one side all lumpy. It's going to be a challenge.

 

This is the biggest problem I face: what do I do with that straight, flat plane? As of Saturday morning, it's a mystery.

 

 Here begins The Part Where Nothing Happens. Right now,  I cannot seem to get a toehold on a design. This is one where I want to plan what I'm going to do, not make it up as I go along. But the lights just haven't come on for any particular idea. I realize, in my head, that this is just part of the process. I remember driving myself halfway nuts  trying to get an idea working on one of the big crystal pieces. It took days of staring, but ultimately the project ended up being one of the best things I've done. 

 

But I feel uncertain, now, in a way I did not feel twenty years ago. Now I have that carping voice telling me I'm dried up, played out, and all my ideas are soggy, and cornball. I wonder if I've already done my best work. I wonder what kind of disaster will come down the pike before I'm done with this five-stone tale. Grim thoughts. 

It all stems from the end of the world as we knew it, and the gut dropping realization that this insane evil isn't going to stop, short of war. It comes from feeling that my back is against a wall, as everything goes to shit, and all that stands between me, and hopelessness is prayer, and the burn to work. This is the path in the spiritual wilderness. The drive to simply get up, and do another day is gifted out like manna: exactly enough for a single day, none to keep, and none to spare. Tomorrow arise, pray, and move forward.

 

Now I know this crap is all melodramatic as hell. Especially considering that I've already expressed thanks for the abundance we still enjoy. Despite everything, I have not lost my abiding sense of gratitude for the good we have. But it doesn't take much: a couple hours of news and current events, a visit outside the Suburban Hermitage to go to the store, or ride the bike. The faceless.  It becomes an awful background music, an infestation of petty reminders that seeps into every crack in every thought, and conversation. It precipitates down into my back yard thoughts, and makes me wonder if I'm just wasting my fucking time here. But I started rounding in the lower edges, lifting them up off the base. Sunday evening I began to get the germ of an idea. Even so, there's a whole lot of sitting and staring at the rock ahead.