Sitting down in to an early morning send-off, my friend and I had breakfast at my favorite place. Last month, she had just completed a month long artist's residency at the Anderson Center in Red Wing and wanted to share her latest project.
Cori is a book artist, and her work has stretched and opened my ideas as to what a book is and can be.
She has distilled the meaning of a book to three of its native elements: it is a narrative ( each sentence, phrase or word has its own story), it is interactive (the reader is integral to the book -- can you have a book if you have no reader?*) and it is on a time continuum (whether you read a book cover-to-cover, read a sentence, or one word, you have a starting point and ending point). Her latest book project would involve the highlighting of our life journeys: the importance of seeing the entire landscape, while at the same time idenitifying the singular weed by the road -- all in a way that crystalizes those moments and puts it on a pedestal to make each moment sacred.
Throughout her explanation, over tea and mango eggs, I had to ask her to stop until I was able to wrap my head around some of the ideas she was sharing. I had to give up how I normally perceived a road weed, a life journey, not to mention what I thought a book was! Once I abandoned my own assumptions, I was open to see things in a new way.
"I need this kind of mind-stretching," I said. "It keeps my thought fresh and open to new ways of seeing things."
"Kim," she said, "that is exactly how I feel when you explain Christian Science to me."
I immediately got the connection. In Christian Science, we see beyond the limited and the stereotyped to the most primal spiritual essence of things. We strive to see things the way God sees them - as spiritual. In doing so, we change the basis of thought - from the material to the spiritual; the limited to the unlimited; the dull to the brilliant; the academic to the inspirational. Only when this is done, can we make real (realize) our original perfection. And in the case of our art, only when we slough off the limited, etc., can we make original, transformative art! Mary Baker Eddy summarizes it like this:
When understanding changes the standpoints of life and intelligence from a material to a spiritual basis, we shall gain the reality of Life, the control of Soul over sense, and we shall perceive Christianity, or Truth, in its divine Principle. This must be the climax before harmonious and immortal man is obtained and his capabilities revealed.
*As each reader brings his or her experience to the book, so no one can experience the book in the same way. And the reader, who is always a dynamic, growing force him or herself, can never read the same book in the same way. This explains why we always seem to get new ideas from books we love and re-read over and over again!
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