The bee house
Sculptures of journeying thoughts
A vital movement that pervades us, though we may not know it,
a deposit of concealed memory, an attempt to unhinge the brakes
that bind us to life’s small world framed by terms of ‘place’.
An attempt to remember our roots, those that root us in that place of birth
yet also free us in the underground movement from the radical entanglements that cause us
to emerge, to rebuild ourselves, to travel towards the goal that lies within us
not yet brought to light, the opaque but sweet honey yellow light.
That small world of ours is allowed and enveloping,
it guards our bonds, and manifests a common, however individual, development,
it involves us in the webs, buried first, then erupting above ground, under the sun,
in our neural pathways that become relational, social, and common despite our differences
The slow movement and the pervasive background noise are the ground where life takes hold
and so it is that, since birth, nature is connected to culture and culture is inspired by nature,
and sound takes on a physical form and is seen in the sequence of honeycomb cells
and the cells become home to letters, phrases, words exchanged as musical notes
in a symphony that unites human beings with all other animated beings,
animals and plants and minerals: the sound of dust taking on a physical form
in the intertwining, opening and closing hexagons, supported by the notes
we ourselves require a reference point in a context which, however, escapes any attempt at being contained and defined
but rather prefers to progress step by step, metre by metre, in achieving its own stability
that results in a flower, a house, life itself: that life in the houses resting on wildflowers, bee flowers, reflects our life
in the colourful solidity that becomes a symbol of our presence, of experience, of ‘being here’,
of facing and listening to each other, a call and response from one little house to another, in the exploration from up above
in the tree branches, curtained by leaves, protected by roots: a slow movement broadening the world.
Nature makes human art the precious
heritage of the knowledgeable man:
Art sets us apart from what is animal, including the social animal:
artists express themselves with tools inaccessible to other living forms.
However… perhaps I am replicating what I had been presented with:
what nature surrounds me informs the culture that also allows me to live
as a social animal: I discover then that everything is connected, beyond my understanding and control.
My thoughts go back to what I have seen and known and rationalise modules of interdependence between different forms of life: I can trace back my own imagination to the beehive in its production of honey, cells, humming, wax, movement, industriousness, vitality, composition, and care for its queen. We are somehow always transported beyond, from the inner to the outer reaches of a schema to imitate and further develop, all the while nourishing the ‘whole’ that guarantees our wellbeing and enhancing one’s private world to contribute to that community, made up of gestures great and small, that can confidently lock eyes and communicate most intimately.
Who can say how bees sleep in their hives: who can say why… they cause us to daydream and imagine so;
who knows why… the honeyed repetition of gestures and buzzing and fluttering activity
is never commonplace, and still manages to go beyond the reaches of what is known: it wants to overcome the ordinary and achieve the new: each tally of pollen a novelty, production is repeated time after time, blending tradition with innovation, with no aim except its own renewal. The geometric structures’ repeating themselves over and over in modules that shape and reshape visual structures, our fascination towards them is due to the evanescent halo the insect’s efforts fix and materialise within the invisible.
Our bodies perceive that vortex, listen to it, touch it, smell it, taste it, store it in jars, pour into hearts, on flower petals, lose and find it in the sensitive surface of our desires, inspiring impossible possibilities.
Curiosity, one we can satisfy, leads us to open the door to the bees’ room,
immerse ourselves in the stupor of that sight, dwell on the colour of its atmosphere,
be reminded of a childhood stillness, recover a forgotten feeling,
rediscover a part of us that is common to all in the rules of everyday life,
human beings who divide their tasks in order to live side by side.
The bee house
charms us and involves us spontaneously. We fill it with many whispers,
oh, well, I never, would you look at that, I reckon, you reckon, do you remember, do you see yourself, perceive yourself
within that coloured cloud of emotion that had gone unnoticed until then,
then imaginable and now materialising the lightest thoughts:
imagination becomes a sculpture of thought and sheds any possible fear:
in the bee room
you are on solid ground and do not know it, a roof is over your head and you do not know it,
solid walls shelter you and you do not know it, you are within the keep of your dream-domain,
your imagination becomes a well-defined emotion and leads you to believe that
from a small house, the bee house, there is the chance for something bigger within our reach, something we can conceive and accomplish and contemplate together.