The Girl With the Metronome Heart

A lot of metronome practice this week, as if I could find comfort in the steady, even beat, the tempo where the piece is within my grasp and the challenge is to make the beat so real it is a container into which everything else must fit exactly. It used to seem monotonous, metronome practice. The mechanicalness of it, the fingers like machinery moving not by will but by exactitude. Art, I decided, would be its opposite, to bend the beat and refuse its tyranny, to hesitate, trembling, here and submit to a fury of emotion racing through those sixteenths. To refuse to color within the lines because it was all about expression. Precision and control now seem prior to, somehow, I guess, or themselves a part of expression. * This number-changing season, which even I...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 31, 2010 | 0 comments

Stone Speak

Somewhere I heard or read an account of a people — I don’t know now if it was anthropology or fable — who sent stones as a means of communicating across great distances. When you feel the texture and the heft of this rock you will know what I was thinking, was feeling. Okay so it was probably fable. But the stone in my palm, that fits as if it were dough pinched off to exactly the right amount to fit, the smooth roundedness, narrower at one end than the other like the snugness of the corner of the palm where fingers and thumb meet, overlap, enfold, and the striated speckledness — you surely know what that means as much as any poem or painting. It’s a game I play with myself, I pick up this pebble and imagine it came from other hands...

Read More
Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 22, 2010 | 0 comments