The Track and the Sea

Companion Pieces

7 x 6.5 x 3.5″ each

A video of this piece is available upon request at jimmalecky@gmail.com

The Track and the Sea

A ticket stand and ticking station clock

The employee jailed in a booth

Music playing to the beat of a heart

In time, time given to move

Station to station, fast there to here

Then slow to slower

From here to here to here to here

Till arriving finally

At the further only home

Where you became and ever were

A soul, a span, a life fully known above

Death, birth and in-between covered

All moonshine there broken by day

Small soul made to be broken too

Into opened upward, grateful, vast

The sea set ever before you

Before ever you traveled rails

Switches thrown by early desire

Before that light shown

Down a lonely track to the sea

Unknown by your nature then, sailor sing

You were rolling slowly for home

Home not shore for such as you

Not home till held and swept

To after the before

Of knowing God’s intention

Sing thank you small sailor blessed

These two works of sculpture are companion pieces, the key figures being a muse playing her violin and a young sailor touched by her playing. Wanderlust, which some say is a desire for perfect home, is the theme. Before giving an explanation of the metaphors used, I would say right off that these pieces were a work of free association that had its roots in Bob Dylan’s “Beyond the Horizon” lyrics.

The cityscape with the young sailor’s face in the foreground contains a small window (upper right) in which the muse sits with her back to us playing a violin. All who hear her in that city begin to long for elsewhere; all would fly if they could, including the poor soul who must stay at his job in the ticket booth. Her playing puts hearers under a spell that lures them with its moonshine as each face becomes, like hers, a quarter moon. All homes in that city have become shadow homes or, at best, dim hints of home. Moonstruck, they leave home in search of home. Their faces have been set; the times will come, the station clock is telling them so.

A close-up frontal view of the muse is given in the companion sculpture. She sits in the very same window, the one above the train station; however, there is no city at her back. The city has disappeared from every spellbound eye and been replaced by a bright but perilous sea in which the sailor, by way of her playing, now finds himself. The fruit and flowers to her left symbolize the power and sweetness of her playing. The three fish at her knee symbolize nothing. They just fit nicely in the foreground of the tiny seascape. Wanderlust of course involves travel, so these two pieces give us a car, truck, train, boat, and migrating geese high in a windy sky.

Miniaturizing, or putting in a nutshell, big realities (sugar eggs containing landscapes, bottles containing ships, etc.) is something people have always done. I have done something like that here not knowing for sure why I liked doing it.

A smaller version of this theme is available in tile form.

White and bronze finishes, each tile 3.75 x 4.25 x .75″