The Heron's Pebble
Hand made Artist book. Paper and board and linen, 5.5"x12", 48 pages
2020
This artist book combines original text, drawings, and photographs. It is printed on heavyweight Canson paper and fabricated by hand by the artist. The 48 pages are sewn together and attached to a linen covered hardcover. The book is signed and dated on the last page. Click for a low-resolution PDF of the entire book.
Copies of the book are available for purchase at $900 each. For more information contact me.
Below are several sample pages of the book.
Click for a low-resolution PDF of the entire book, including the complete text, layout, and imagery.
The text reads:
Somewhere in these words is the truth, I think.
I think I believe there is such a thing as truth,
but it is hard, impossible, to reason your way to that belief.
Descartes, who was much smarter than I,
worked hard at it and did an admirable job,
but even he is not fully convincing.
Still, I feel that somewhere there is some small stone,
rounded and worn from aeons of rounding and wearing
-- somewhere there is some small pebble of truth.
(Quick!, said the bird. Find it! Find it!)
Perhaps under the claw of a heron standing on a rock in the middle of a stream,
one small rounded pebble among millions
has found its way under the claw of a heron
standing on a rock in the middle of a stream
teeming with rounded, forever tumbling rocks.
Except for its desire to fool some frog or crayfish
into thinking it is a stick,
it would move to dislodge the pebble.
But its mind is elsewhere and it doesn't move,
pretending instead to be a stick.
The motionless heron,
after seven heartbeats within its chest
(how to count the heartbeats of a heron?)
turns its head to look at me
a pebble of truth under its toe.
Finally it turns its head back to its business
and, abandoning its hunt,
raises its heavy wings --
and slowly flaps off
like an ancient and majestic pterodactyl,
leaving the pebble of truth to drop
back into the stream from which it came.
How many millions of years
(pebbles and crayfish know nothing of years)
will it be before that pebble is once again isolated and visible?
And will a heron once again capture it?
Shall I be a heron in a next life
so I can capture that stone,
and pause in my fishing
to look at a small, rounded stone beneath my toe?
And will I know its value if I do?
Or will I fly off
to be about my business?
Front cover, back cover, the book in its slipcase.
