AJ Alanson Author

I am a writer but sometimes tapping out tiny symbols on a flat page can’t quite scratch that itch, scream that profanity, or exorcise the demons. On rare occasions, a sculpture invades my struggling mind and replaces my words. I saw her finished in one flash. I heard her name in the same instant. All there was left to do was to figure out how to build her and yet she told me how to do that, too.

Chipped Away. That’s what I uttered under my breath after I witnessed the last vestiges of forward progress crushed under Jack boots. Chipped Away. Past tense, done and dusted, without recourse and my 80-year-old mother scoffs as the fourth generation after her loses rights she’d seen slowly gained over her entire lifetime. Chipped Away. Societal protections put in place to safeguard against the worst impulses of the impotent because, obviously, if left to their own devices, their compulsion to ensnare, enslave, and ultimately erase reality would consume their humanity and endanger ours.

I don’t care what you do with your daily choices, man or woman, but make them. If you can’t, if you’re so broken, so hollow that you need to look outside of yourself, look anywhere else to engage your scattered mind, spew venom to lubricate your shriveled veins, and cleave to hate in order to squeeze another beat out of your frozen heart, know this: I can make my choices for myself. And that is the eternal gulf between us. Not our politics. Not our faith. Not our birth, station, color, sex, intellect, luck, or fate. It’s that while I’m doing me, you’re also trying to do me.

The quiet truth, and please don’t tell the monsters under the bed – probably checking to see if you’re doing it right – is that when I shuffled to my kitchen this morning with my bed head in a swirl and a decidedly unsexy robe, filled my cup, and stared out into the dawn, you, the monster who is so endlessly fascinated with my choices, wasn’t there. I chose coffee instead of tea this morning. You weren’t there. I slipped out of bed without a morning romp with my partner. You weren’t consulted. I pulled a family-sized frozen meal from the freezer to thaw. You never crossed my mind. I went for a walk in the woods instead of dressing for church. As far as I can tell, you aren’t in either place. I’ve only summoned up your thin spirit here, today, such that I can tell you that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy, irrelevance, indifference. In short, “Was someone talking?”

However, I digress, but not really. Chipped Away is a protest piece – unapologetically so – and yet, in a very short while, she was also restorative. What started with a tiny curl of walnut as the ball of her foot, grew upward with very little help from me. That tiny tiptoe, I knew, was the foundation of her outstretched fingers at the very top, desperately reaching to grasp another escaped chip of herself as it floats away.

Parts of her are already gone, a shoulder, a leg, and some are disappearing, but still she clamors for any piece she can pull back to herself. Constructed only of a framework of wood curls and chips, the sculpture rose impossibly to nearly 16″. Eager to assemble herself, I only placed the pieces, well, between the miniscule pieces and the glue, I wouldn’t say “placed” as much at I stuck to everything but once in a while, got the chip or curl in the right place.

As often happens in the throes of art, the muses have something else in mind. As I was constructing this woman under siege, bits of maple, cherry, walnut, and cedar stuck in places I hadn’t noticed. And they fell as leaves, feathers, and flowers, building her up again with beauty and symbols of life. Standing now at full height, she moves with every vibration but is somehow solid. My husbands says, “She’s surprisingly flexible, yet strong, just like a woman.”

I’m working on the finish and her pedestal now, taking all the time she wants me to take but I figure she’ll be set up on the mantle or a shelf by this next weekend. Chipped Away: a sculpture I didn’t know I needed to create but a message I needed to say.