Collage

I often get the feeling that I am just collaging ideas together here, scraps gathered from one area and then another, brought here, and taped together with a capital and a period. It’s not art, I keep thinking… but it’s fun.

Take Sam Anderson’s mini essay from his New Sentences series, this one on Nassar Hussain’s ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’. Anderson writes of Hussain’s poem: “It is powerful to see these foundational myths reconstituted out of bureaucratic mundanity — like a model of the human genome built out of Legos.”

And then look here: Jason Kottke’s: “Four Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish” includes, “This Lego bonsai tree is ‘a mindful build’ designed for adults.”

Is there a point to this assemblage? No. It’s like what the kids and I do sometimes after school… I didn’t notice this creativity was missing until I unrolled a filled-up roll of paper from an IKEA easel we’d set up last year at this time for school-at-home. The roll had journal sentences, announcements, explanatory drawings, and just-for-fun drawings. We stopped using it, and I’d regretfully put it away, until I realized, having unrolled the old roll, that the creativity inside was in fact a back-and-forth between the kids and I. We gave each other ideas and sparked artistic tangents for no other reason than because the white space invited us to.

A poem being described with a Lego metaphor - the Lego there being an allusion to what is clunky and heavy, versus the image, offered by the Lego company itself, of a use that aspires to lightness and intricacy - a bonsai tree, mindfulness - is delightful when paired together, don’t you think?