Excerpt: Handwaving

The matter of forgery and copies came up again, in a conversation at Sebastian’s New York ‘place’ – a rather extensive loft in an unfashionable part of New York.

“It was good value when I spent more time here, but it could as easily turn into a gallery or studio. The legal guys are onto the change of use, and the Health and Safety assessments and all that.”

They were seated in a small ring of sofas and armchairs, in the corner of the loft away from the street. When you entered the loft from the lift on the far side you might not even notice this furnished area in the vastness, but once found, and settled into, the circle defined a space that had the reassurance of an invisible room.

Sebastian and Tina were sitting facing the back wall, Lionel looking out over their shoulders to a wide expanse of floor and air and not much else. Again, far in the distance, you might suddenly pick out a full size drum kit that you hadn’t noticed before. At the other end of his sofa, sat The Owl, looking either wise or hung-over and life weary, the lines on his face today etched a map of his life.

“You can’t forge conceptual art,” he said.

“Well, that takes us into the whole realm of objects, and whether and which are art, and which belong in design or craft?”

“Those are words, man,” said The Owl, in a whisper.

“Well, yes, but things made by people express creativity, but the reason and motivation still remain interesting,” said Sebastian.

“OK, but don’t you guys value the art against a money scale?”

“Mostly we know the present and possible future exchange rates, yes.”

“So a tribe that makes a beautiful thing for one ritual event, and then abandons or destroys it puzzles you. You want to keep it.”

“This was true, but we’ve Tinguely’s self-destructive robots, and such, since then.”

“Which turns it into a performance.”

“True. You have to be there.”

“Or, these days, record it, and capture the spontaneity into a future artefact.”

“And the process of recording, and editing, and cutting, and generally improving means that even a recording of a dancer, or piano player these days may have been improved, or corrected – it may not demonstrate something they could do live.”

“Exactly,” said the Owl, “and then you have an electronic product that no longer needs the artist touring to manifest the dance. That you can sell.”

“OK, I accept that the lines between the arts is fuzzy, you could almost see a painting as a record of a performance, just as you might see the ghost of a carpenter circling a very old piece of furniture, looking at it from all angles. In fact, I guess the action painters specifically implied that you might see a painting as a record of a human activity, a sequence of moves and choices, a physical dance, and so on.”

The owl yanked on some thong around his neck, and a small pouch came into view, of suede-like leather.

He looked up, wordlessly, and indicated the pouch, before opening it gently, and reaching inside, to produce three stones, in fact, three pieces of flint, two shaped into fine, barbed, arrowheads, and one bulbous and brutally broken, with a savagely sharp edge.

“Do you think of these as art or craft, or tool design?”

“They’re beautiful,” said the guys, picking up an arrowhead each. Tina leaned forward.

“Don’t pick up the round one,” he said, “it’s actually quite dangerous.”

“So how old are these arrowheads?” said Lionel.

“That depends. On whose calendar you use, the moon or the sun.”

It tickled Lionel when Whispering Owl did his Indian shtick. But it was a great show.

“OK, in sun time, how old is this one?”

“About 35,000 times around the sun,” said Owl, “Stone Age people, you know.”

“Fantastic. So delicately shaped, so well designed, and made without tools.”

“Metal tools,” said Owl.

“Well, yes. Harder stones, I assume. Banging the rocks together, that was the secret.”
Lionel smiled at the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide reference.

“It’s true,” he said, “and before you get good at it, you break a few stones, and sometimes a bit of skin, or even a finger.”

He carefully lifted the third object.

“Just breaking flints in half left very sharp edges,” he said, “great for cutting, scraping skins, and so on. People discovered that really early on. And this is still sharp,” he said, as he picked up an orange and cut the skin in a fine, clean, razor cut, as smooth as a scalpel through flesh.

By now Tina had got the two arrowheads to look at. She was comparing them, and holding them up to the light, and catching the glint of the surface, gently testing the tip of the arrow with a gently finger prick.

“Did you find these?”

“I found that one, in your left hand, in the land of my ancestors. Experts tell me it is tens of thousands of years old, and ‘of interest’ but arrowheads are quite common, you know, they were mass-produced, even if they definitely rescued and reused this kind of head. So, what I am saying is that as ‘art’ they aren’t worth much, maybe as artefacts.”

“How common are they?”

“Well, there’s a trade in ‘real’ ones, of course, found on the ancestor’s land, and worth a lot to a tourist, who would never buy ‘art’. They recognise the craft, and the magical history of a time machine.”

“And this other one?” She waved her right hand.

“Oh, I made that about five years ago,” said the Owl, almost smiling.

Tina looked at them both again, almost unable to tell them apart.

“I remember which one I made, because I remember every stroke I made, like diamond cutting.”

“But that’s fantastic work!” said Sebastian.

“Worth more than the old one?”

Sebastian smiled. “OK, you got me. So what about that other one, that rough fragmentary knife? Is that from the ancestors, or one of your early attempts, before you got good at it?”

“Oh no,” said Owl, “you throw away a lot of failures, archaeologists find whole piles of castoffs, the ancestor’s mistakes, but still interesting.”

“And this is one of those? Unfinished?”

“No, no,The Great Spirit made that one.”

“?”

“Flints also break under natural forces, of various kinds, and just by their nature are very sharp. The first ones would have been used as found, and goods ones treasured. No-one knows exactly when someone decided to repair or improve one of his stones. His early attempts may have drawn mirth from his companions, until flying shards made him unwelcome in the circle. And that first inventor must have wondered about what he or she was tampering with, with minor wounds like bites of the gods. And even more exciting, sparks would fly, too.”

He flicked his Zippo idly; doing a couple of trick ignites and closes, rhythmically.
“So this wonderful thing I have here would be an ancestor’s dream, just like this knife”, he said, pulling a large knife out from a sheath at his side.

“So your pouch has something made by nature, something made by an ancestor, and something by you.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Very nice. A power object.”

“Of a kind.”

“A little nest egg, too, I think, the combination.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“Oh no, no,” protested Sebastian, “I just know other people would love to be presented with this set, for contemplation.”

“Well, I’ll start the story again,” he said, carefully returning the three items to the pouch, and tucking it back down the front of his shirt, “and you can record it.”

“No, no, thank-you for the lesson. I’ll have to rethink most of my language now.”

Owl looked sideways at Lionel. “What do you think of the medicine man shtick?”

“Very cool, man, great props. And are they all what you say they are?”

The Whispering Owl stared at him blankly. “How would you ever know? They illustrate my story.”

Lionel was less unfamiliar with this routine that Sebastian and Tina, who knew him only as a sidekick of Clarissa’s (“I’m her Tonto.” He had said, when her name came up.) Well, he was her numismatic curator, that was what they had heard, but still felt unsure about his status, his sensitivity about his culture, and so on, so they had tiptoed around.

By contrast, Lionel had found The Owl a great companion in the room, as he would happily sit for hours, alert but unspeaking, or just as happily gather a circle and tell stories. The tall tale aspect of some of his adventures seemed to come from a story-telling tradition that relished exaggeration, and The Trickster element existed both as a character in the tale and in the teller. So he had watched The Owl doing his thing quite a bit, and then deconstructed it with him over a pipe, so he had storied trying to act properly, and was therefore totally comfortable, knowing this was story-telling not truth-telling, but that it wasn’t a lie, either, as it was true to life.

Recognisable. It could happen to me. How would I act in that situation?

Even now, a lot of Western white folks still project a lot onto the natives, in any country they take over, and who knows, perhaps they do have some unknown magic.
“He gives good Indian,” said Lionel to Tina, lightly punching his friend on the arm.

“You could make a fortune around the crowned heads of Europe and the stoned heads of Hollywood,” said Sebastian. “I feel like I have had an evening with George.”

“That’s his highest compliment,” added Tina.

Owl kept his silence, unaware that any comment was expected of him. He knew he wasn’t unique, but at least he considered himself authentic. Even if he didn’t take himself very seriously, not since the acid.

He stretched and stood up. “Gotta go walkabout now. Oh no, that’s aborigines,” he said, wandering out of the circle into the expanse of the high-ceilinged room beyond.
The Great Spirit! The Air initiation!

“And no, “called The Owl from far away, shaping his hands around his mouth, “we don’t think of The Great Spirit as god,” he hooted, “above him, you’ll find the unknown god, impossible to describe, whose image is light, and fire, and lightning, and of course, The Sun.”

He turned away, as they busily slotted what he had said into George’s model, of the great mind as the Air, but that the final mystery lay beyond even that – beyond death and life – in the energy field that underlies everything.

“There is no death,” chanted the Whispering Owl in a resonant cry, from the far side of the loft, “only a change of worlds.”