black soil
Black soil ... a grandmother's bedroom wall ... a name that keeps changing ...
We start where the dirt is dark enough to grow anything ... Central Minnesota ... 1959 ... Flatlands so level you can see weather coming from two counties away ...
A grandmother named Katie Murphy Otto saves almost everything ... She saves a small tempera painting made by a six-year-old ... A bleeding cross inside circular energy and natural forms ... She frames it and hangs it on her bedroom wall ... Not in the hallway ... Not in the kitchen ... The bedroom ... Where she sleeps ...
The talent ... Katie says it was passed down ... From an aunt named Rosemary who died in her twenties ... Farm accident ... The gift moves through the family the way water moves through that black soil ... Finding whatever is lower ... Filling whatever is empty ...
The village is conservative about art but full of characters ... Every one of them carrying a nickname that fits better than what is on their mail ... The countryside is right there ... A bicycle and no particular destination and the kind of freedom that comes from not being watched too carefully ...
At a keg party in St. Cloud ... standing in someone's kitchen ... a kid talks to the painter Philip Pearlstein ... Just like that ... A high school art teacher named Alan Halm opens his living room library and the world gets wider without anyone leaving Minnesota ...
Art school ... MCAD ... 1978 ... The parts that stay are not the degree ... Eating a meal blindfolded with casts on both hands ... Tearing animal silhouettes out of ten-foot sheets of black construction paper ... The body learning things the mind will take decades to catch ...
Commercial work comes next ... Greeting cards ... Hand-lettering for advertising agencies ... The strangest assignment goes like this ... Buy Ukrainian compartment dolls from an eastern European gift shop ... Sand and prime seven wooden forms ... Paint business people holding phone receivers to their ears in Ukrainian folk art style ... to explain the breakup of a telephone company ... Every word of that sentence is true ...
A fashion magazine in Milan puts a painting on its cover ... In the subway a man in a bright scarf reads that very magazine while a Prince song comes through the speakers ... Minneapolis on the cover and Minneapolis in the air ... both ... in a city that is neither ...
Late thirties ... I do not have a better word for what happens next ... The body and the soul say the same thing at the same time ... Enough ...
We drive to Ottawa ... The Canadian Museum of Civilization ... Eighteenth-century Northwest Coastal Native American sculpture ... The hands recognize something the mind cannot name yet ... Back in the Twin Cities a woodcarving shop appears in the garage ... Cedar ... found objects ... things that were never supposed to go together finding each other inside carved-out wood ...
Hospitals want this work ... Patients need something to touch ... Something that connects a person standing in an urban wing to what they already know about bark and grain and the weight of a stone near a river ... The wood remembers the tree ... The hands remember the garage ...
After that ... everything ... Every direction at once ... Costumes invented on the spot ... Performances that do not explain themselves ... Paintings pulling from whatever the world section of the newspaper left on the table that morning ... Not specialization ... The opposite of specialization ...
The names change ... Defluxos ... Desoulos ... Each one a skin that fits for a while and then does not ... The practice does not care what it is called ... It keeps going under whatever word agrees to carry it ...
We are still on the black soil ... Still flat enough to see what is coming ...
Source material: February 10, 2009
Composed: February 4, 2026
Origin
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Chanson
Authors:
Oyparaploo of Wonderful Garbage and Noir Chanson Frequencies.
Reach Chimes assisted by Clod Hopper
Oyparaploo
