The Last Word On Nothing

This ran July 10, 2020. Over the intervening few years, the kids have tapered off and finally stopped doing this, though they’re still uncontrollably attracted to those little red winterberries that they call birdberries. But on the whole, they’ve moved on to other things and currently it’s perfecting cartwheels (the older one is finally doing perfect circles 90 degrees to the ground, the younger one flumps around on her back) and climbing the maple. I look out the window and there’s kids dangling off the tree, yelling for help because they’re scared to jump; or kids making a running jump at a low branch they’re still too short to reach; or kids up in the tree swatting lanternflies with a flyswatter and against the odds, a lanternfly sometimes plummets to the ground where another kid screams like a siren and stomps the daylights out of it.

I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day.  And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice).  I started taking pictures of them.

After the first few arrangements, I saw the arrangers.  They were two little kids, a big and little sister, though the big sister was the boss and sometimes had help from other little kids.  They’d hunker down, fold up like double hinges, getting closer to their work.  They’d try this, try that, flatten a leaf, put the berry in exactly the right place, the berry would roll away, they’d put it back, thumb and forefingers, pinkies sticking out.  All this would take time. Lately the heat has been plastering their hair to their foreheads in wet curls and their cheeks turn pink.  I think they are enchanting.

This is the first arrangement the little one did alone. She’s probably mimicking her older sister but she’s also seeing it for herself. Why do they do this?  I can see absolutely no reason.  No one told them to, no one rewarded them (I did say thank you but they weren’t interested), no one showed them how.  They’d never seen this done, they were doing it because it was there to be done, because rocks and plants must be there to be made something of. 

And now I’m off onto my theory of the origins of engineering and art.  The origins of engineering, I already covered.

Art has been around since at least the Paleolithic, roughly for at least 40,000 years.  The earliest art was representative, an imitation of the real thing: this is what a woman looks like, this is what a horse looks like.  And maybe, scholars think, drawing a bear  on the cave walls made you less afraid of it, or carving an ivory bison helped you hunt it.  They call this visual symbolism, one thing meaning another thing — like verbal symbolism, the way a letter means a sound, or a sound, a bear.  They say such symbolism is a mark of the first thinking.  I think this is enchanting too.

But it’s not what the kids are doing.  I think they’re going even farther back in human evolution, and nobody would know how far back because arrangements don’t likely leave fossils.  They’re temporary by nature.  The kid arrangements last maybe a day before the plants are too dead to be interesting or the mail deliverer stumbles over the rocks or I have other uses for the table. 

I think these arrangements aren’t symbolic at all, I don’t think they mean a thing.  I think that art generally doesn’t mean a thing, that it’s not standing for anything else. I think it’s the recognition that everything is just its own sweet self. 

I think that recognition has been what is so comforting in this pandemic – social media is full of kittens and crows and flowers and sunsets and elephant-head flowers — that it’s all outside us going about its own life. I think the origin of art is not only in the Paleolithic, it’s in every kid born and stays in them until death. 

The origin of art is Look!  Just look at this, will you!  Look at how shiny the grasses are.  Look at how this leaf curls.  Look how heavy and speckled the rock is.  How interesting the sticks are. Just look! Oh! I’ll arrange them like this. This. Goes. Right. There. Look!

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Photos by me.