WOOD
Haiti Manifesto
Haiti has been on my mind for forty years.
Haiti has been on my mind for forty years. I lived there, worked there. I believe that in Haiti I became the man I wanted to be.
It all started with Kenneth Roberts and his novel Lydia Bailey that evolves primarily in Haiti. I read it the first time back in the early sixties while still in high school and I vowed that some day I would go there. But at that time I had some other obsessive passions and some equally obsessive challenges and these took me in directions away from Haiti. It took me ten years of traveling, searching and becoming a father to finally rekindle my vow to go to Haiti.
Wood
Carving wood is a private and personal passion for me. It has been so from the beginning. My work has never been done with the purpose of public exposure or public display. It is simply my nature to work quietly, pursuing a path totally devoted to an internal search that is meant to reveal to me the forces of creation. Life for me sits on a tenuous foundation that holds life and death in a precarious balance. And I have felt from the very first steps on this earth it is easy and dangerous to trip and fall at any given moment and for those steps to often be at the vagaries of circumstances. I always looked for the passageways to secret territories where special and personal worlds could be created. Woodcarving, sculpture is such a world for me.
Wood
Sometimes one has to be pulled by both ears and dragged to the watering hole and forced to drink from the
source of life. And I did pick out a piece of apple wood from the wood pile and with a well cleaned and sharpened axe I began to remove the bark and began to feel the first call of this amazing material. I saw wood which served its purpose as part of a tree that had given so much pleasure and discarded with a final mission of delivering a warm blue flame in the cold winter months before returning to the earth as ashes and thus completing the biblical cycle of all life. I saw a thousand generations of wood carvers and I saw the great river in front of me and I remember thinking that once again a new miracle was handed to me. My mind trembled with excitement and I remember sitting down because I thought I would faint and I thought of how silly it was and typical of me to procrastinate and reject and then finally cave in complete surrender and how those few moments that bright morning would once again turn my life into a maddening and transforming turmoil.
It was that morning that I thought of Haiti, of Kenneth Roberts and his wonderful novels; especially the great adventure Lydia Bailey. I thought that I would now settle down along The Saint Lawrence River not only to raise a child but also to carve wood right there on that spot for the rest of my life. There was only thing more I needed to do- visit Haiti as I had promised myself during my teenage years. That, at the time, was the only remaining thing left on my to do list made during dreaming years. Happily and sadly, my small family and I remained there for three years.
