Sally Chandler / Bibliography:  click here to return to articles

Burnett, Warren, publication, "Earth Mass" from the Warren Burnett Collection, 1989

“What I tell you is the monstrous reality. The brute has been marking time and dreaming of a progress it has failed to make. Any archaeologist will tell you as much; modern man has no better skull, no better brain. Just a cave man more or less trained.”

H. G. Wells . . . “The Croquet Player”

Affluent America is at its priggish worst when distancing itself from the primal bipeds to whom we are so easily traced. And, few are comfortable with the notion that we may not be first among the animals in evolution's race, and next to none of us face the proposition that our neighbourhood botany might include a life form or two well ahead in intelligence and evolutionary knack.

Haughtily, we show superiority over all things animal and vegetable by positioning ourselves to destroy, or radically change, our planet's life, squandering our synapses on goals little understood. It is much as though we fear being thought weak unmanly to show fear for, or insist on, accommodation to, earth's life systems. Should we go through with the madness, I hold scant doubt that vegetables will fare far better than animals as our planet's adulteration goes forward. A time might come, then, when bipeds will wait tables at rutabaga cotillions.

Earth Mass tells that it does not have to happen, that there is beauty enough for all, that the slightest shift of values might incline our pleasure in color away from golf cart enamels and cashmere tints, and toward the grace naturally and abundantly around us.

There is another side to Earth Mass. It is: a celebration, a festival, a smile earning, ancient chord striking, gentle disrober of imaginations too long layered. The fewer the viewer's inhibitions, the greater the joy. Children, barely able to make a sentence and never a paragraph, know what is going on here, know that fun is to be had, and are a good bet to use “so pretty” when telling of these images in frolic, images often lost on corroded fantasy formers.

It is likely that, in the order of things, tens upon tens of thousands of years ago, a synapse went unsquandered, rising and falling and making course with the tides and winds of inheritance, pausing from time to time to oversee the making of a god, or to ease a last breath, causing the sweet dreams often wished for us, and finally making its way into the amalgam of glee, discipline, and hope that is Earth Mass.