I thought about this last fall (of 1999) while I watched the woven-branch sculpture growing outside my office window, with the changing crew of helpers -- students, people volunteering for or working for the Scott Arboretum.

When my older daughter was two, I bought her a set of multi-colored sticky dots to play with. She sat down at the table, looking very businesslike, peeled them off one at a time with her perfect little fingers, and stuck them to a piece of white paper. I gestured, suggested outlines or shapes, but she laid the dots down in a random pattern, with no regard for their colors, to form a variegated blob, a two-dimensional bell curve viewed from the top, about as interesting to look at as any other mass of ordinariness. In the end you couldn't even see the first layer or two of dots in the middle, though the middle was raised in an interesting way. When she was done, neither of us seemed to feel the paper was worth keeping.

My son (at nine) drew wonderful monsters for imaginary battles, based on violent and inappropriate computer games: half a page of dragons on an alien planet with elaborate space ships approaching from the other half page, which is the sky. Some dialogue appeared in thought balloons on the page; the rest, along with the sound effects, was performed on the spot. After he was done playing I'd find the page in the trash, with the wonderful dragons and space ships mostly scribbled out by explosions. Did he want to keep it? No, he said, he was done. I would have loved to keep the pictures, but they were destroyed by the battle action.

Perhaps the impulse to keep what one creates originates in the impulse to give it to someone else, whose enjoyment teaches us to look at the thing as more than the process?

Copyright 2001 Sibelan Forrester.

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