ECHOSIS

ECHOSIS - Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

For Samara, her therapy practice was truly a means to an end. With music her first love, finishing her PhD while composing her first major composition proved more than challenging. On receiving her therapy license, she vowed that she would work hard to save the money that could provide the time for her escape to composing music exclusively. For now, however, fulfilling the obligations that two hundred dollars per hour demanded was the first priority of the day. She sat and waited.

Seated across from her was her West Indian patient from Jamaica who spent the majority of each therapy hour staring at the floor. The rare occurrence of a question or a statement brought Samara forward in rapt attention, only to be thwarted by his seeming inability to converse beyond the singular answer to my question, "Pierre? Is there anything you wish to talk about?"

Pierre raised his thin, twenty-one-year-old torso upward, as if a wrecking ball was resting on his shoulders. "I don't want to talk about it anymore."

As usual, her retort amounted to, "about what, Pierre? We've not picked a subject yet."

"He's just a son of a bitch."

"Who?"

"Him."

"OK. Does ‘him' have a name?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"OK." Samara looked at her watch. It was only twenty minutes into the session. She could only imagine the next thirty minutes would be more of the same. This was not the first such session. She had brought the non-communication problem to the attention of Pierre's mother, but she was bent on Samara continuing, regardless of the silence. "He's just screwed up. Give him time," his mother had insisted. "His father is paying top dollar for the best, right? So do your best." Samara paused, re-crossed her legs, took a swallow of water, and waited some more. Two forty was the time when--

"Can I go now?"

"Let's try again," said Samara. We've still ten minutes."

"Waste of time. Waste of money."

"Finding the words sometimes takes patience."

"C'mon, mon. To just sit here and have you just sit there? Jesus. I have better times with my hallucinations."

"Is that what you think they are?"

He looked up and grinned. "You have a fancy name for them?"

Samara shrugged. "No. Hallucinations is the word we use too... when that's what we're talking about. Are you sure that's what you mean?"

He rose and tucked is shirt in, then pulled it out again. "Doesn't matter. I've got a long trip to make. Gotta get goin'" He turned and started toward the door.

"See you next week then, Pierre. You can call me any time, you know."

As he opened the door, he turned over his shoulder. "Why would I want to do that?"

The side door shut and Samara remained seated, her gaze fixed on the exit as she reminded herself that this was what she had spent eight years learning how to do-listen, listen, listen.

"Why would I want to do that?" continued to hang in the air as she prepared for the next patient.



---



Driving to the quarry on a Thursday was a pain. Harry wouldn't be there. No one knew the stone like Harry, but today was his day off. I never made this trip on Thursdays, but I had to get out of the city.

The fall colors were starting to appear. Early, I thought. Sign of a bad winter coming. Even with the fall foliage to keep my interest as I drove, the anxieties kept nagging me. Taking out my aggressions with the chisel and hammer was proving not to be the way to overcome discomfort. That's what I paid Samara for, except today her schedule was full.

Another cigarette was not the answer either. But, like the addict I was, I flung the half smoked butt out the window of my '88 Ford Pickup and started to light up another. Like a watch dog in heat, the red and blue lights accompanied by the howl of the siren announced the pursuit of a driver's worst enemy, the salivating tan and black breed. I placed my shoe leather gently to the brake and stopped.

I cracked the window just enough to be cooperative as the stout gentleman of the badge lumbered up to my truck.

"License and registration, please."

"Something wrong, Officer?" I said, the cliché phrase obviously making him bristle.

"Of course not. I just wanted to stop and chat," he replied as I handed him my license and registration. He sauntered back to his patrol car to check me out. He couldn't be stopping me for a stupid cigarette out the window, could he? No. I had to be speeding. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I hated traffic school and that would be the result of this stupid mistake. I glanced in the rear view mirror only to see him pulling up along side me. What was this all about? Cops don't pull along side you when they give a ticket.

His hand came up and motioned to follow.

"Follow," I thought. Shit. He's taking me straight to jail. I couldn't have been going that fast.

He pulled ahead. I sat there frozen, when he suddenly gave a burst of the siren and motioned once again to follow.

Three miles later, he pulled to the side of the road and got out, walking back to my car. Again, I rolled down the window. "What are we doing here, officer?"

He pointed to the mountainside. All charred. "Seventeen thousand acres, Buddy. Seventeen thousand. All with the flick of a butt out the window." He tore off the ticket and handed it to me. "Think next time." He gave a two-finger tap of the brim of his trooper hat and strode back to his black and white.

As I looked at the ticket, I had the urge to piss, shit and upchuck, not necessarily in that order. "Five Hundred Dollars!"

It took a few moments to calm down, but then I looked up at the hillside he had pointed out. Suddenly, the blackened area took on a different meaning. He was right. "Think." Nature took care of its own. Man had no right to usurp such authority. Where would my art be were it not for nature's natural process? I looked at the ticket one last time and nodded to myself. There are no accidents. I pulled onto the highway.



The rest of the drive was slow and smokeless as I thought further about the forces of nature I so depended upon. It was late afternoon when I turned into the Jensen Quarry.



"Mr. Turrel," bellowed the gatekeeper. They always made a big thing about keeping the gate locked as if some one might come in and steal a couple of tons of rock.

"Hello, Gavos. Like your new hat."

Gavos blushed and adjusted the beret.

"My daughter. Sent it from Hungary. Nice color, don't you think?"

I squinted playfully at the red and green plaid and smiled. "Yes... very European. Cheerful."

I pulled into the quarry and marveled at the "magic hour" light that turned the gray, white and black veins of granite into Alpine glow. I drove to the quadrant that inventoried carefully cut blocks for their special customers. Getting on the list had taken a lot of years of jack-hammering my own pieces and schlepping them to the studio where patrons would often marvel at the richness of pattern, believing the rock's origin was Italy.

Today, however, I had a particular size and shape in mind, so I pulled the climbing gear from the back, cinched on the harness, grabbed the chalk bag and started the climb up the back side of the four hundred foot slab of granite. For most, the work by the cutters was sufficient. They were good. But, having qualified with demolition instruction from their best explosives man, I had acquired a license to blast my own. I knew from years of climbing that sometimes the best veins in the rock were hidden. Today, after several climbs on the slab, I was planting the dynamite where I knew I'd get my best chance at success. Two hours later, Gilanni pushed the plunger and the corner of the outcrop dropped the hundred feet onto the prepared sand mound.

For the next hour, I, along with several workers, maintained a constant lean on carbon bits, further carving the rough shape and size. As usual, the percussive sound that breathed spirit into the blocks of formless mass was music to my ears. For these men of massive arms and shoulders, these artisans from Europe and South America, cutting was an art of birthing they had spent decades perfecting. These men that seldom spoke, save for the drone of their jackhammers, were my closest friends.

In our tradition, one that Gilanni and I had started several years ago, the quarry cutters stood around the pick-up and I stood atop my rock and handed out tall bottles of ice cold Spaten Lager from my picnic cooler. We lifted our bottles as Gilanni gave tribute-"To nature for allowing us to rip from her innards yet another piece of her heart. May it be worthy of the sacrifice."

"Zum Wohl!" the cutters shouted and quickly tipped the first of several lagers that I continued to pass out to quench the thirst my friends had wholly earned.

Later, after the men gathered their lunch pails and headed for home, I once again climbed atop my rock and stared at the dark sky. My shirt, caked with the perspiration of the pneumatic trauma I'd given my body, felt like cardboard. Jeans that only a few hours earlier had reminded me of Samara with their Downey smell of freshness, were now stiff with dust and sweat. I peered down at my feet standing on the perfectly cut eight-hundred pound mass now resting in the back of my pick-up, the weight all but buckling the springs, and wondered who was worse off, my wheels, or me? As I looked once again toward the heavens, my eyes caught a glimpse of the single light bulb above the "no trespassing" sign. While fireflies darted about, leaving their familiar contrails of atom-like designs above the hundred watt playground, moths played Kamikaze. Gazing at the early night stars, my mind drifted away from the pain in my shoulders and into the images of surreal thought that had obsessed me for so many years. The challenge of another piece of nature's history filled my mind, and I climbed aboard and started the long drive back.

Leaving the quarry was always a strange kind of excitement. Sometimes cathartic, but always an exhausting test of will power and focus, I anticipated the struggle I'd experience with yet another attempt to ground what Samara had spent months getting me to understand was my very stubborn and belligerent id. She counseled many artists, and being one herself, she believed the magic of creation was more often than not, the providence of the unconscious or id. "Your hands, eyes and ears either allow a channel for the world of the unconscious to thrive and express itself, or you become the captor and slave master of all the bottled up imagination and freedom the ego and superego try to imprison with a vengeance." I could see her cupped hands as a scale-her favorite demonstration. "Artist or schlock."

As I drove up the on-ramp to the 91-South, I started to prepare my mind for what lay ahead. How many completions had I experienced? A dozen? All were in museums or lobbies of skyscrapers, save the first born that hung above my bed. All bore the unmistakable Derek Turrel stamp of being unfinished. Sometimes appearing as a minor flaw, other times a "gross arrogance," as one critic put it, the one constant was the various works increasingly become front-page art news. I tuned the radio to a jazz station and lit a cigarette. Here I was about to begin the nine-month vigil once again. Yes, I had turned more than a head or two over the years with my nine-month time frame for each sculpture. I hadn't planned it that way in the beginning; it's just the way it happened. Now, with the encouragement of Samara, the nine month thing was habit-a mystical time clock that knew better than I when the creation was finished. It didn't matter where I was when the nine months ended, I always capitulated to the magic, as I preferred to call it.

I turned up the volume as Coltrane filled the cab with his kind of magic.

The cars' headlights flashed through the windshield like slow motion flashbulbs of the past; snap shots of the abstract storyline of my life that were now hundreds of rock and steel impressions of my experience. If only I could rid myself of the sometimes overwhelming impatience of the chisel and torch. Samara had been working on that as well. "You're letting the tail wag the dog, Derek. Your tools are not you. You're the captain on the ship." I had usually nodded in agreement, but there was always this nagging suspicion that if I didn't respect the love affair my hands had with the tools, I might lose whatever it was that made up my so-called talent. "Your imagination with your work is only superseded by the fantasy connection you have with yourself," she was fond of saying.



As if on cue, my cell chimed in with a text message from Samara. "Know you don't like to be interrupted on a ‘rock day,' but only one more patient, and then going to hang at Stefano's. Drop by if you feel like it."



I had four more hours of driving. I didn't know if I felt like hearing, "When are you going to do it?" again tonight.