Friends,
Why would hundreds of strangers celebrate a pencil in front of someone’s front lawn, and why would they do it every year on the same day, rain or shine? This is what I asked myself this summer when I was standing in the shadow of a twenty-foot tall sculpture of the classic writing utensil. To answer that question, we have to go back in time to a dark clouds and rain and wind strong enough to blow off a roof.
In 2017, a windstorm blew through the Twin Cities, knocking over telephone poles and trees and tossing debris across the streets. At the Lake of the Isles, the wind and rain was so strong, it tore off all the limbs of an old burr oak (“the king of trees,” we learned last week). When the storm was over, the homeowners looked outside at what was left: a gnarled trunk, an eyesore twenty feet tall. Do they chop it up into mulch? Leave it? Something else?
Instead of tearing it down completely, they decided on a more creative approach. Minneapolis is famous for Claes Oldenburg’s Spoonbridge and Cherry, so they decided to hire a local artist to riff on the theme of ordinary objects. They chose a pencil for the subject matter and invited friends to attend the final steps of sculpting—when the artist sharpened the tip. The Annual Sharpening of the Lake of the Isle Pencil was born.
Seven years later, I’m standing in the rain with Lindsey and our friends Aaron and Miranda, and we’re smiling ear to ear at the festivities around us. Absurd things pursued with utmost seriousness are catnip to this writer, and we loved every minute of this.
Before the sharpening, music was playing (a full-brass Mariachi band had to cancel due to the rain, unfortunately), kids were running around on the lawn and waiting in line at an ice cream truck, and, yes, many attendees were walking around dressed up for the day. My favorite were two elderly ladies wearing construction paper party hats that looked like pencil tips.
Then the ceremonies began. The homeowners shared the backstory and welcomed the crowd. An announcer told everyone the pencil could talk in a special language, and they had a special interpreter present who could translate all the kids’ questions. They stretched tin cans and string between the pencil and the microphone on the ground and started answering whatever the kids could come up with—“How tall are you?” “Does it hurt to be sharpened?” “How big is the paper you write on?” “Are you lonely in winter?” (My question would’ve been “what do your next-door neighbors think of this,” lol).
Then men dressed in white wigs and knickerbockers solemnly walked carrying an official declaration. When they arrived to the front porch, the president of the neighborhood council read it out loud: a legally binding proclamation renaming “Lake of the Isles” to “Lake of the Pencil” once a year on this day. Everyone started cheering. Cue passing out commemorative pencils, cue tee-shirt cannons launching merch into the sky, cue kids with ice cream cones dancing themselves silly.
But then the celebrations took a somber turn. The “Imperial March” from Star Wars started playing, and we all looked down the street to discover a row of marching men. Dressed in pencil body suits (of course) they pulled a massive red sharpener behind them with all the seriousness and solemnity of a funeral march. It was time. They marched to the base of the pencil, and then—surprise!—the song lurched into dance music. More silly dancing, more tee shirt cannons, and more general mayhem. The men carefully raised the red sharpener to the top of the scaffolding, and it was finally time to sharpen.
The artist asked us to raise our hands to the pencil while they sharpened, and they started turning. Then—now, this is my favorite part—as they turned the red sharpener, the assistant threw poster-sized “shavings” from the scaffolding down to the kids below. How imaginative is that? As the kids ran around catching their own shaving, the artist snuck in a metal graphite-colored cap to the top of the sculpture, and they removed the sharpener. Voilà! The newly “sharpened” pencil stood tall, we all cheered, music started playing, and as we started to disperse, I ran up the front lawn to gave the sculpture a hug. The Annual Sharpening was a success.
So what’s the deal, then. Why write about a dorky pencil sculpture in Still Life? What’s the deep meaning here, Michael?
Let me just start with this. Gathering around something so silly is fun for its own sake. Its value isn’t in the deep thoughts (which, as you might guess…..I do have many……), but in the thing itself. Silly things like this are joy-magnets, and they can pull us out of our ego-drenched anxieties and isolation. They remind us that we’re only human when we’re human together. I highly recommend coming next year, and, if you stay long enough, you could go to the eighth annual Cat Tour, too.
But then yes, there’s some deep thoughts I can’t help but share. Maybe I’ll write more about it soon, but if you’ve been reading my recent letters on building social sculpture or remixing tools of oppression into dance parties, or using art studios to revitalize a city, you’ll get a sense of where my head’s at. For now, let’s just end with a short thought exercise.
Close your eyes and live in the scene for a minute. Ignore the twenty-foot tall pencil at the center and look around the lawn at the periphery—what do you see? Food and dance and music and play and costumes and mementos and imagination and laughter and ceremony and all the things that add color and texture to our shared life. Are you not starving for this? I know I am.
“Participating in a crowd gives joy, as being a mere spectator cannot,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her book on the history of collective joy and festivals. The pencil wasn’t the point, really. It was the excuse to participate in something larger than ourselves. What’s that for you? What festivals are happening where you are? What’s in your city that’s nowhere else that you’d have to see to believe? Is there a Tomato Art Festival or Outhouse Races or Llama fashion shows? Something else? Whatever it is, please go. Wear a silly hat. And let us know about it so we remember what seems so easy to forget these days: it’s a joy to be human together.
Take care,
Michael
“Offering” by Donika Kelly
after Mary Oliver
Here is the meat
and fat and bone
of the day. The smoke
too for the god of recognition.
A love offering,
where love is also
grief and mourning,
the business of waking
and moving in a body far
away from you,
sweet friend.
Where waking
and moving mean
crying or not crying,
but always breathing.
Mark how the light
bends through the dry
air, like breath,
at the end of the day.
Mark the chirbling of the bird
outside my window.
Mark the day we will see
one another again,
and what light there will be,
what song.
Bread and Puppet Theater is doing a circus tour next month—see you there?
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