And so he remembers as in a dream a memory of himself, one morning, half a century ago, finding a mound of orange clay in the backyard of their house in the city. A group of builders was digging the foundation ditch of a house they were building. A pile of soil grew around them.
He was already a young child and so proceeded to play with it. The soil turned out to be clay and so he started making objects with it using just his fingers. He felt an immediate sense of a singular pleasure just from forming the clay into whatever things he could imagine in his mind. Soon, he had a whole group of little clay things, which he made one after the other. This included copies of the famous papier mache sculpture of the Beatles posing as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the cover of Life magazine.
He spent the better part of the day just playing this way until late afternoon when neighborhood kids, mostly his cousins, started coming out to play. Soon there was a whole group of them forming things with clay. And what do you think would be the all-time favorite form they made?
Little penises, of course. And then they would laugh as kids are wont to do. And do you think they would have enjoyed themselves just forming things? In due course, they started throwing littles balls of clay at each other. And not very long afterwards, all out war. He learned early in life how kids are like this. He had fun being like this too, being like the others.
But he remembers this afternoon clearly in his head. His clay would set well enough so he could paint one of them with poster color. It stood for a time on top of their piano. Soon they would be gone the way of most of his childhood works. He cannot remember the time they disappeared.
But he still forms clay from time to time, shopping for them, when he can, from places like Cagayan, Dumaguete, Albur in Bohol, etc. Every place has its own special clay; and yet it is equally true, clay is clay wherever it comes from. He has done many of them. And if not with clay, he has done many sculpture using metals, copper, stainless steel, steel. Metal is really just like clay only harder, since one moves metal molecules where one only moves soil particulates with clay. But they behave more or less the same way. It is carving which is really different.
He has changed much since that one, first, afternoon with clay. His awareness of what can be done with moldable and malleable materials has grown much. So too, his understanding of the historical phenomenon and the general constructs of art. He loves art but only equally to artisanship. It is the act of forming which casts the spell on him. The act of putting ideas into the things he forms is fine, but this occurs in the head. Forming things with his hands, with hammer blows, with tools, the scream of power tools, enchants him.
They make him forget, brings him into a particular world somewhat hermitically insulated from the natural travails of ordinary life. Outside this world, things of frightening concern: life and death, food and rent, family, taxes, and also the panacea for all human troubles, fame and fortune; Such being the nature of life.
But when he is alone with his art, he is far away from all these. He is not trapped in time. He is ageless. He is the same little child as from long ago playing with clay, not burdened by all the weight every adult carries on adult shoulders: dreams, ambitions, security.
When things go from bad, to worse, to hectic, for him, he retreats to a time long ago and far away when he half-decided what he might become in the course of his life. He reminds himself now and constantly: What he has become is not artist or writer. He is still only the little child forming clay with fingers and hands.
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