There are people who genuinely appreciate paintings, poetry, and other arts. I wish I did. It seems like I only respond to music, occasionally writing, and even "architecture" once in a while.
Be that as it may, this is time for our annual pilgrimage to a stony picnic table in southwestern Utah.
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This stone picnic table is almost a religious shrine to me.
Who is responsible for it? Surely not some BLM bureaucrats! For one thing, the picnic table is not ADA (wheelchair) compliant. Besides that, it is too imaginative for bureaucrats. Perhaps the BLM offered a competition to the local schools, and one of them came up with this.
There is a patio stone quarry a mile away. In the backdrop, the photos show Gooseberry Mesa. This picnic table should be offered in the dictionaries for the word, autochthonous. It seems to grow right out of the rocky ground nearby, as if people didn't have to do anything to build it. I literally fluttered my eyelashes at it.
But wait -- this is inverted. The local topography was formed subtractively, not additively. (Recall my sermons about differential erosion.) So let's not imagine Fred Flintstone building the picnic table out of sedimentary shards of rock, but rather, imagine the picnic table forming over long periods of time, by erosion.
Isn't that what the art of sculpture is all about, according to Michelangelo? Didn't he say that every stone has a sculpture inside, once the unwanted material is removed?
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