The Clay Head Benediction

by Marty Rafter

right?’

  “No, not dangerous. Just very very strange”

  “And that disqualifies me?”

  “Yes. Actually, no, but I am in a serious relationship”

  “How serious?” I say

  “Well, we’re having a baby, so …pretty serious”

  “Really? Wow…Congratulations” I say

  “Thanks” she says

  “See, that is good. I think about that a lot, actually. It is good that you are having a baby. You know, if the Taliban, and those guys in Mali that ban all music are the only ones having babies, the future is going to look pretty bleak.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking about it like that” she says

  “Yeah, I try not too either. I am a natural optimist. Thinking about what is wrong with the world all of the time is part of the problem”

  “No, I mean, I’m not really thinking about the baby and the thing in Mali you were talking about in the same…”

  “Context?” I say

  “Yeah...in the same context.”

  “Well, that is probably for the best too. That kind of thinking can get pretty overwhelming”

  “You can have your little head back if you want” she says

  “No. I definitely don’t want it back. It is for you. I make them to give away”

  “For Christmas and stuff?”

  “No, just in general. I hide them for people to find...in the park, on the bus, that sort of thing”

  “Why?”

  “I like to.”

  “You could try to sell them. Why don’t you sell them, do you hate money or something?”

  “No, I don’t hate money. I just don’t think about it in that way, just like you don’t think about babies and the musicians in Mali”

  “That’s weird” she says

  “Not that weird. People spend their whole lives getting excited about selling toilets…. that's weird”

  She laughs. “But people need toilets”

  “Maybe people need to find little clay heads while they are hiking in the park” I say

  “Not more than they need toilets”

  “You don’t know that. People need to believe all kinds of impossible things. That is how we give birth to what is possible”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t hide them...” She says

  Then, all of the sudden, I had a huge feeling of relief.

  “I get it now” I say

  “Get what?”

  “You and me were never going to get married”

  “No, never, not even close” she says

  “..I know. I know that now. ..Sorry, this is going to sound crazy, but bear with me, you had something to tell me, and that was it”

  “What was it?”

  “That I should stop hiding them. You had that message for me”

  She laughs. “Ok”

  “Seriously, that is good. That is a really good idea. I keep going back to my hiding spots, and most of them are always still there. That is a big sticking point for me. You’re right”

  “Oh don’t think I...’

  “Well, obviously not, not by your own will, but that was it...That is what I was looking to hear...” I say, and I am really excited. Happy, actually …not happy, thrilled. The whole thing finally makes sense. The girl, Alicia, isn’t the start of something new; she is a thread, a wonderful, important critical thread in a tapestry.

  “That is extremely bizarre” Alicia says, but she also laughs a little bit as my enthusiasm starts to catch on.

  So, I jump up and shake her hand, and apologize for my expectations, and thank her for her wonderful bit of information, and she seems a little alarmed, so I also promise that I will not bother her again because now I have a new mission…a better mission, and she accepts all this politely enough for a person who has just shared a meal with a person who is now raving about a burst of inspiration. And I say goodbye, and she thanks me for the head, and I wish her luck with the baby.

  “Good luck with your baby” she says

  And I smile and laugh, and promise to send her a birth announcement, and she smiles, and I walk as quickly as I can from the museum, and run all of the way home. I finally have it.. a conclusion. Or at least a turning point that is so glaringly obvious that I am surprised that I have never thought of it before. What I need next is a magnum opus, an object that is impossible to ignore and will snap all of the casual destroyers from their routines and make them into creators, or at the very least, wake them up from the cycles of casual participation in all the non-creative endeavors of the city, and make them think about actually doing something worthwhile.

  Here, in my city, a city that was once the heart of creation for the whole country. Carnegie and Westinghouse, and rivers of steel, and whole generations of people who went to work and came home knowing that they had actually made something, has somehow resurrected itself with industry the extracts profits from the ends of the lives of those same people and calls it progress. But it isn’t anybody’s fault. No one can be blamed for what they need to do to survive, but in the age of free information, why do so many people need to be paid to certify that someone has actually learned something? I’m no luddite, nor do I pine for an imaginary past that never existed in the first place, and at the same time that Pittsburgh was teaming with people who created things with their hands, the lower half of the country was still covered in the pox of segregated bathrooms, and restaurants, and schools... the memories of the good old days are a balm for people who want someone to blame, when we are all to blame. We always have been. I never lived in that time anyway. By the time I was born everything in this city was broken, and a lot of good people fixed it, at hospitals and the universities and everywhere else. And there is no such thing as a perfect model, if there was, we would have stumbled upon it by now, but then, there is always too a time for the artists to shout out like that screaming horse in Guernica.

  And there is that too, the Spanish civil war, when idealists of every stripe planned their world; it is the artists who survived. The authoritarians and the idealists are gone, but Picasso, Hemingway, Auden, and Orwell, and Neruda still live, not as idealists, which they certainly were, but as artists alone. Do you know who Pope Julius II was? No? But you probably know who Michelangelo was, and what the Sistine Chapel is. When the pope commissioned Michelangelo do you think he figured that his name would largely be forgotten? And that is sort of my point: not about art, but about life in general. With apologies to Gandhi for bastardizing his famous words, greatness isn’t retained by any attempt to hold on to it. That point is foundational to the longest running story in Western culture, and still we don’t listen. A nondescript carpenter of low birth in some Roman backwater lives his principals to the bitterest ends, and babies for 2000 years get water splashed on their heads, and the primary points of the whole ordeal become generally accepted good ideas, and the details become cause for war. But that is us, that is people. And I make heads from clay, and some tiny part of me hopes that there is something to that, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter because I am going to make them anyway.

  In the beginning there was silly putty. The stuff that you use when you’re a kid to copy newsprint, and make shapes, and it can be formed into a ball that bounces. Silly putty was originally created by accident during World War II when scientists were trying to create rubber substitutes, and I got it as a secret Santa present from one of the regulars at the bar. And I took it home to my apartment, and added it to my huge collection of other junk that I didn’t use and didn’t need. And one day, when I was watching my enormous television, I took the silly putty out of the drawer and played with it. And I made a face. And that face was good, so I crushed it, and made another, and so I bought better clay. The kind that lasts. Then one week, my friends and I took a trip to New York City, and in between the bars and sleeping the day away, there was a woman and her husband on the subway who sang Spanish folk songs and n
o one else really paid attention, but I cried. I really started earnestly crying. And so, I started looking for things like that, little ships carrying what I was missing. And I read everything that I could find, and I the more I read, the less I knew. And I started to dream, really dream...Joseph Campbell’s private myths. When my lease was up, most of what I owned didn’t move with me.

  Then, a lot of the people that I knew moved on…from the bar and into normal life. And my poor mother was thrilled when I told her that I planned to move on too, and get into real estate, and stop living mostly at night. She probably told all of her friends in the community and the ghost of my father that I finally planned to put the Economics degree that they paid for to use. And I have never had the heart to tell her that it is all fake. Because by then I had long ago stopped thinking about how money works, and moved onto thinking about why money works, why anything works. The world is filled with people who are experts in quantifying a collective delusion. At that time too, came Wittgenstein. So, I started renting apartments, and moved into something that is simple and tangible and harmless, and I started making the heads, and giving them away. The more I gave, the better they became. My little kites, carried like the song of the woman on the subway onto destinations I can only imagine, and now there will be my opus. Anonymous like the rest, but the best I can do, and put somewhere where it will be seen. And then, I will be back at the beginning.

  When I sit down and start to