Ja. I've been thinking about trans-formations lately. A very obvious thing that I never pay too much attention to. Night changes into day. Big deal. Happens so often, that to think about it seems unnecessary. I just get out of bed and as quickly as old age allows go to make coffee. At least.
But when you think about it, it's really magical. So smoothly natural. Every instant a change is occurring. Imperceptible, you could say. Until it's so obvious that you go "oh! Time to get up!". Actually, this is only partly true. Living in the New Mexico dessert I've come to getting up way earlier than sunrise, so my routine's adjusted accordingly. Since it's dark and cold, I start a fire outside. Sit around and gaze at the sky for a while. Then, put the water on for coffee. That's also a transformation of sorts, a change from a city routine.
So this thinKING about changes, it jumped over to my work. All of a sudden I'm changing a sculpture that for all practical purposes didn't need to be changed. But I went, ja, this one too can go, will go, through how many changes before it becomes dust? So why not see some of them? And it wanted to be really strange. Way different than it was. I was surprised. Alarmed. Tried to understand what happened. But, how to understand something like this? Curiosity always wins out over doubt.








































The torso goes through really beautiful transformations just from the change in light. I end up shaking my head in disbelief. I see her all the time, and suddenly it's as if we're on a different planet, never before seen. Stops me right in my tracks. Makes me think. And when I saw the colors in my shadow, I thought, what's the changes occurring in me? Are they just the natural and obvious approach of death, or is there something else going on in there all the time which is so subtle as to be unnoticeable? What started this whole process, seemed to indicate that the possibilities of really radical inner changes are an unnoticed fact, something we don't normally think about. What it was, was this goofy little insignificant bug, which also went unnoticed for the longest time. When I first saw the empty shells of these critters in my small "pool" ( just a medium-sized old satellite dish, about six feet in diameter, filled with water.) I knew they were the remains of bugs that turned into dragonflies. Didn't think too much about it. Then one day, as I was carving, I noticed this water bug just swimming around, diving and disappearing under-
water for a while, then re-appearing to swim around rim again. So I decided it was time for a cigarette, and sat down to watch this guy. Much later, fascinated, I discovered that in this stage, these guys are called nymphs. As I watched it swimming gracefully about I'd thought of sting rays. Mermaids. But they're nymphs.

Ja. Nymphs. There's a smaller version of dragonfly. A damselfly. Just the names seemed beautiful. Flying damsel. Anyway, I ended up watching this guy for nine hours. At first, on and off, as he appeared to just be swimming around, trying to make up his mind as to where exactly he (or was it she?) wanted to get out of the water, because from the dry empty shells I'd guessed they do their trans- formation on dry land. Then, when it appeared that it was getting serious about getting outta the water, I watched it non-stop. I told it; "o.k., you little fucker. Better do this right, cuz I wanna take photographs of how you emerge from this stage.". And as I watched, I began to realize that what I'm seeing is a pretty amazing transformation from a kind of an ugly, flat fat water bug into a flying insect that maneuvers through the air with much better ability that any technologically advanced helicopter. Actually, a fly flies way more gracefully than
any flying machine. Only I had no idea how this change from water bug to flying expert came about. So, I did the only thing I could. I watched.
Of course, the first change was that it went from being an underwater breathing bug to one that was able to breathe air. The six legs it had and used for swimming suddenly became land walking appendages. This one, in his swimming around, had somehow managed to break off half of his middle leg on the right side. It'd stop, still in the water, and I could tell it was getting tired, tired and frantic almost, it seemed to me, as if it knew that it didn't have much time left to do its thing.
It was getting on in the afternoon, and it was acting as if it was terribly important to do this. As if whatever change was happening already within it was pushing it to go faster. This inner change became apparent hours later, and at this point I couldn't even guess how incredible it would be to see what this critter showed me. But, as it stopped to rest for a while, I could see it moving its stump of the broken-off leg, and I thought, poor baby, it must hurt, huh? And it'd sit there, still as can be, except for the stump waving in the water. Finally, after a very long time, it managed to get out of the water. The surface of the satellite dish too smooth for it to get any traction, and it'd fall back time after time

This is actually, again, quite a bit later, maybe hours later, when it was finally on solid ground, going somewhere. I followed it and followed it, and it kept getting darker and darker and I kept thinking, man, this might take way longer than I'd ever suspected, do I really want these photos so much?










So, because it kept falling back into the water, I decided to help it, and I'd put stones and twigs behind it to keep it on dry "land". Perhaps that was a mistake on my part. Maybe it needed all these struggles to assist it in the changes that were occurring inside, to flex whatever muscles inside the shell it was to discard. Hard to tell. The more I watched this little critter, the more I liked it. I couldn't help developing a sympathy for it, a sort of compassion. For such a small bug, so much was expected of it if it was to survive and become. Kafka came to mind, with his story of the Metamorphosis, but I couldn't remember him writing about how this change occurred. It seems to me that the guy just woke up one morning already a huge bug. So, it made it to the lip of the dish and fell to the ground, where it began its migration to somewhere. All the time I was trying to come to grips that here's this thing that just a while back lived in water and was now traveling on dry land. Did I remember reading of walking catfish? In Florida? Thoughts of first land dwellers coming out of water millions of years ago. Out of the "soup" where all life originated
and little by little developed. We all came out of water. At birth, "the water broke" and we began emerging into a completely different world. Didn't fall to the floor and begin to crawl away, but a drastic change of environment. As I'd already said, it was getting darker all the time, and I still did want the photos, so I put him on a piece of rubber padding and carried him to my bus, where the night light was such that I could see better what was happening. Put him up on the hood, and watched. By this time, I'd gone inside and gotten my powerful eye-glasses.
It's sort of a bummer that the photos don't coincide with the story. The photos are backwards. I never remember how to load this stuff onto the site. I guess I could delete everything and re-do it, but too many other things to do to wanna devote so much in the name of perfection.
Anyway, after I'd carried him to the bus and the night-lite, he appeared to wanna go onward. So I decided that maybe he needs a little snack. All this unusual exertion must've tired him out. So I found him a little greens and put it in front of him. Man! Was he happy!!! He practically ran to the little weed, and proceeded to climb onto it. Once there, (which took a lot of time cuz of his tiredness), he didn't do anything at all. He definitely wasn't thinking of eating, so I took him back to the pool and dunked him underwater. I don't know what drove me to do this. I thought a little moisture would revive him. Would bring him to his senses and he'd better be able to remember what it was he was trying to do. Well... Wrong again! When I brought him back to the bus he was all weird. Dead looking. His wings had began to separate from the thorax, but now, all wet, they were plastered back against his back. Boy. I felt like shit. But we stayed with it, and amazingly enough he came back around. His wings began raising, and then I noticed that he was really bloated. Somehow, he'd swollen up to twice his original size. Not his head and thorax, but his abdomen was all blimp-ed out. I couldn't believe my eyes. And he wasn't moving. Then it was that I realized that the dry shells of nymphs that had successfully gone through this change, all were in a vertical position, clinging to whatever they chose. So this guy was doing the same. He'd gotten his little greens to which he clung in a sort-of-vertical position, and movement was no longer a necessity. So I picked him up, with the rubber pad and all, and carried him inside my house where it'd be a little warmer, brighter, and I'd be able to sit down. Still no idea how long all this would take. The optimist in me thought maybe a few more hours, but the way things developed I soon realized this may take days.

One of many shells floating in the pool. It was from seeing these that I knew that even though he'd broken off part of one leg, and it probably hurt, it wasn't an urgent situation, because apparently inside the shell they have another set of legs waiting to develop. The whole thing was so bizarre... It got more so as time passed. As I sat hunched over him watching every tiny little change, he began to have like convulsions. As though he was flexing new parts of his self, and he'd flex to one side, then he'd arch his back. Then he'd rest. Again and again he'd flex thus. His bloated abdomen would arch upwards, curling back almost to his wings, and inside this pudding-like mass I could detect movement of some sort, as though whatever kind of new skeleton was growing, was also flexing. And I thought, humans too, go through a stage where days, or a week or two after fertilization occurs, we're a pudding-like mass of life. And it began to seem to me that this pudding already has an intelligence within it, which is utterly foreign to my thought, but this intelligence is able to, within this pudding, organize everything so that this mush joins with this mush, and with that, and begins to grow into something quite un-pudding- like. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that scientists were toying with the idea of storing computer information in a liquid instead of on a chip or disk, and I remembered thinking how the fuck do you extract information from a liquid? I mean, when you put clean water into clean water, the two mix so that, what? You can still tell where the two separate waters are? I thought they mix so, not thoroughly, but so completely, that you can no longer tell. Like air mixing with air... So how would you retrieve information out of a soup like that? But apparently soup and mush and puddings are quite capable of organizational feats which I'd never considered before. It was, mind boggling. All this time, this bug was doing his flexing. Sometimes he'd just move his head a little bit this way and that.
Much later I decided that he can do this without me watching...
I said good night to him. Told him I still want the photos of him finally emerging, so please wait until I get up before doing the BIG PUSH. And I went to bed.

Days later, he'd dried quite nicely, well enough to discard the dry shell, I thought. But, apparently, he dried inside with the shell. Nothing ever happened. He never emerged as a dragon fly, nor as a damsel fly. For over a week I kept checking on him to see if anything at all was changing. But, no.

I don't know if it was the coldness of the nights that killed him. Or if it was my interference with a process which I knew nothing of. Could've been both. Watching a change like this is one thing. Taking an active part in it not knowing what's what, is very human, but, unsatisfactory. All the experiments done in the name of science throughout history should've reminded me of that. And it was constantly in the back of my mind. But the curiosity, the wanting to know, to see...

I believe I'm a little bit late with these transformations, or at least, late in thinKING about them. Transformers have been around for ages. Kids had the "transformer" toys decades ago. Never really paid any attention to what it means.
Change has been all around since day one. Every-
thing changes, even things that seem they're un-
changeable. Well, at least the outer changes. Though I'm quite sure that the recipe for coke has changed also. Hard to tell if it still tastes like the very original drink did. I remember, when I was driving the tank
trucks, hauling corn syrup. A lot of it went to Coca Cola. And that's what they used for sweetener. But for certain Jewish Holidays, for the Kosher Cokes, we brought them sugar syrup. The cans had a tiny little, almost invisible, "k" on them somewhere, so that the buyers would know that this was the kosher drink. Blessed by the Rabbi during production. I'm sure that for a discerning palate, the taste was noticeable.
Two pretty old coke bottles that I'd found in the desert. The one on the right I'd say is older. Not fluted, a little bit flat on one side. Much thicker glass. Some El Paso bottling company... The glass bluer than the bottled cokes I remember from childhood. But even those small glass bottles of coke are almost gone. Mostly it's plastic or cans... The relief I made, inside the red plastic heart-shaped candy box... Even the decorations on the cans change. Pretty fast, too. This one, with the sun-glasses didn't last too long. Some special occasion. So I used it to make this image of a young Indian Seer from way back, from the old days... He told his People that a strange kind of peoples was coming in the not so distant future bearing many strange, beautiful, and some dangerous gifts. Unimaginable things. He probably saw these drinks from that distance......