Mental acuity diminishes when effort is forced. Inspiration, however, is not demanded. As the man said, Find it in the work. Sculpture’s labor affects each of the five senses: the smell of the oiled chisels, and the ozone in the air after a glancing hammer strike; flying stone slows under visual concentration, until it appears like cosmic dust caught in terminal orbit at the edges of a white-on-black galaxy; taste your plaster to measure its consistency before committing your knife to its first cut; listen carefully to your sandpaper, and the sheet yields a pitched voice of surrender at those last seconds before losing its polishing grains; touch your fingertip to the end of your tongue, rub the hot saliva onto your forearm, under whose skin the muscles have just completed their surge of blood and oxygen through each hiss of the file across zinc or granite or olive wood. Do this through your soul to bring the Mythos alive. Make them beautiful, Minus. Make them kind to us humans.
(Today he dances slowly around her in balanced orbit. Look – Touch – Scrape – step – Blink – Peel – Blow – step – Dip – See – Move – step. She’s in white, from wrapped hair to curled toenails. She grins at him and to the world opening around her. He moves, turns his shoulder, and she waits for him to circle back around: shuffle, toe tap, the light scrape of moccasin leather on floured boards. He senses her visage change. Impish, she is, because another awaits his attention (patiently) to one side of this performance; she knows he will attend to her alone — until she is satisfied, until he is satisfied.
Yesterday her grin was wise in the morning light. This evening’s shadows have harried that aspect. His angle of perception helped find and define her mouth, how it changed, overnight or, minutely, through hourly intervals. And with the changes, he saw her uniquely exposed: come to her from behind and she is the essence of the quiver-limbed woman, as much by thought as perceived age; walk straight at her and she forces a slower pace on you, reticent of her stare, always on a moving hand despite its station; and in your movements (the motions of the viewer) she does not rest inside an altering gaze — first slanted here, then there — because you’re trying to catch her eye, find her at rest, in her stare that never moves but absorbs what notion glistens on your lips.
Tomorrow he’ll moisten her. Cover her in oil. She will blush under his eyes.)