Piece by Tyler White

There is a beautiful show on campus at the SFCC gallery of pieces from the woodworking department. The creative writing class visited, and Tyler White wrote this piece musing on furniture and much more.

I could fall apart like a jigsaw puzzle suffering it’s rug being pulled out from under it… but I’m not going to. But perhaps someday, when a circumstance is no longer a circumstance but rather a vector of self expression, I will take myself down, a deep bowing, sliding my own tenons away and out from their sockets, folding my panels inward, my stretchers upward, and turning into darkness where my face sees only cardboard and bubble wrap. To be a table and to experience a gentle disassembly by the hands of life is like being born anew. It is delicate – the balance between a pleasure and an addiction, like gossamer threads being drawn out of a seed, and so too is the balance between being a servant for folding and embodying the possibility of folding at some future time. That time will never come to me, nor I to it, but I could handle it if we were to meet. For I know this because I am too fitting, too rotund with ego of my own architecture that it would take the end of all tables to collapse me to finality – the destruction of the world itself. You see, I have been loved beyond my own utility. I have a question for you, onlooker – when a loaf of bread is sliced even and spread on a platter in front of hungry souls, does not the loaf, in it’s inner genius – it’s doughiness and flavor – transcend into the higher realms of beautification by the salivating maws and onlooking eyes of the poor and helpless therein? It is this same projection that increases my ability to satiate beyond my true ability, beyond what I really am – a benign stack of sticks upholding a pane of glass. But so are you, and even lesser – a bag of bloody juices and marrow upholding gaudy fabrics and spectacles. I don’t look at you like you look at me. I stand here proud and exclaim – “Look at my joinery!” I am impressive, although I am here to be whatever you want me to be just so long as you agree to the deal: I will take from you your beauty, your arms, your legs, your corporeal reverence, and in exchange, I will present myself to you in my four-legged magnificence, as an object to wet your palate for the finer things in life, to make you feel small when you don’t have me, to become your key to happiness. You will like having such an object. And lo! – So happy I will make you! To the degree in which you want me is the degree in which I will make your dreams come true… if only you could possess me. Try to take me by force and you will only find despair and a trail of vapors where your hands tried to grasp at me. This is the trapping in which you may fall prey. More wisely, attempt to seize me by creating a vacuous state in your mind and you will have no need for me any longer. All of the tables will become yours, each one with an uncountable quantity of baked breads stacked upon them in pyramids. Then, I will be small. My legs will bow under the weight of your emptiness. Go now – avert your eyes from me! I turn away from you in fury and abashment of my own words. Forget me completely and you will be spared a surreptitious self-murder.

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Carving by Ivan Dimitritov

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