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Human Head is a Cube
- University of Nevada Press
- Chapter
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: : 196 : : At the end of July in 2002, my good friend from Salt Lake City, K. C. Muscolino, telephoned me in my Denver attic. Because she knew I wasn’t faring so well, she convinced me to attend a workshop with her in Helper, Utah. The class would be taught by Paul and Sylvia Davis, well-known Utah painters and sculptors. We’d be studying the human head. Drawing. Sculpture. I was a musician and a writer; K. C. was a photographer. We both thought this would be a good change for us. She wanted to expand her horizons. I wanted to be curious again. I took Amtrak from Denver. The train pulled into Helper two hours late, the town that had been named after the extra locomotives hooked up to trains to help them over the steep grade in the nearby pass. K. C., who’d driven to Helper from Salt Lake, met me at the station, and helped me settle into my room in a cavernous building that had once been a flophouse for coal miners and railroad men. The first night I didn’t think about the ghosts of those who’d been there before me. That first morning, we learned triangulation. We were instructed to treat the human head as a cube. This would help us develop the right perspective and understand the geometry of the face. Learning that eyes needed to be placed at the midpoint of the cube was a revelation. Then we were assigned to draw the head of a fellow student’s beautiful girlfriend. She was young, a bundle of pheromones, a sex goddess. He fawned over :: The Human Head Is a Cube :: The Human Head Is a Cube : : 197 her. I think my jealousy mingled with my attempt to draw her face. The lines of her face in my drawing appeared somewhat harsh. We sculpted a young Chinese man, a park ranger in Capitol Reef National Park. When I shaped his head in clay, I felt as though I were caressing him. I wondered if he sensed the familiarity my fingers were enjoying as he sat in the center of the room and turned on his stool every five minutes. During class time, I befriended another student—a doctor’s wife who lived in an out-of-the-way Utah town with her retired husband. When we conversed over dinner that evening, I heard myself heating up the familiar narrative about my recent divorce that was killing me, about my failed first marriage of thirty-three years (the number thirty-three made me sound lovable , I must have thought), about the rough relationship with a drug addict, about not doing so well on my own. It was as if those stories had become tattoos. I was showing off my tattoos again. Looking into my water glass, I caught a quick glimpse of myself. I saw a crazed lady wandering through the streets, spilling her story like water to anyone who would listen. I made an effort to change the subject. We talked about writing. Kathryn had attended one of the Writers at Work conferences where I’d spoken on a panel. She’d tried her hand at writing, too. She asked if I’d seen a book of essays by Margaret Atwood. “You must read this,” she said. She went to her room, returned, and placed the book in my hand. Not wanting to hear myself telling any thread of my story again tonight, I went directly to my room, changed into my nightgown, and settled in with the book. The lamplight was dim, but good enough for a few pages. Immediately, something caught my attention. “It’s somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is—possibly—the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is—possibly—the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.” After I read this, I laid the book across my chest. I felt a slight sense of recognition unwillingly making an appearance. This was the first time it had occurred to me that I might be locked into the story I told over and over—as if I were locked into a seat on a Ferris wheel in an amusement park. I didn’t like the notion of myself wandering from listening ear to listening ear repeating the story about not being well-loved: somebody “done [34.228.7.237] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05...