dog-ears in the wrong notebook

The Knead for Art
Lawrence Ypil

THE fingers of both my hands are aching.

A few days ago, you see, I was kneading. Unfortunately, it wasn’t dough. If it was dough I was kneading, then at least I would be eating bread by now. Or a piece of pie. Or some elaborate pastry dish that would pacify my hunger, if not the ache of my hands.

Instead, I was kneading some clay. No surprise, since this was a sculpture workshop I was in, and not an introduction to baking 101. And there was no head chef in sight, but a long-haired art teacher. No cake to bake, or icing to make, but the vague dream of an outline of a clay pot. And of course, no eating to be done, except in the looking, or the touching, or at best, the inedible shape of a pile of clay in the shape of hotdogs.

Organized by BATHALAD (a group of poets and fictionists in Cebuano) and headed by visual artist Raymund Fernandez and Cebuano fictionist Bambi Beltran, this clay sculpture workshop was meant to introduce to a bunch of wordsmiths the tricky, malleable smithy of the earth. No danger there: switching words and verses for gravel and clay, turn of phrase for turn of grip (or limp of wrist), symbol and sound and sense for texture and shape and hand.

In fact, there was much a writer could listen to and learn. About how much time it took to start from where to begin: making the clay, mixing it with water, kneading and gripping it till one’s medium was born. One could easily get lazy with words. Pen in hand, a few words for a line, and the handy keyboard of a computer doesn’t help. But here in the workshop of water and sand, one could spend the whole day just trying to know what it was one needed to hold in the hand, even before there was any hope to begin the outline of a leg.

And who cares if one got dirty, as long as one’s “beauty-meter” always pointed north to yes. Beauty-meter? Raymund’s word, of course, which meant our inner gauge of whatever it was that made our hearts a-quiver, or our eyes a-flutter—whatever impelled our finger or wrist to make a sharp curve bigger, or a clay-mouth have a wider smile. Beauty, in this case, seemed not only to be found in the eye of the beholder, but in the knuckles of the maker. If only more of us writers would care to check our own beauty-meters, we’d be struck silent most of the time.

Too bad, I didn’t have much of it, time, that is, that day, having a flight to catch. And all I had to show after all that kneading was a pile of clay fingers waiting to be formed. Enough of a lesson to learn that before figure or bowl, there was salt of the earth. Before dream of a man shaped in the likeness of the maker, there was soil of the ground. And before the breath of words, there was a lot, a whole lot of kneading. And maybe needing too.

I know I need to go back one of these days and finish what I started. Lest I return to the air-conditioned, lazy bottom task of writing a poem, or weaving some words, or whisking from a good weekend, this short tribute to sculpture, called a column.

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