Ground Tension

     With the vacant and lifeless eyes of blind men, human beings
feel the earth.  They flounder about foolishly on the dark and clotted
wave into which they will sink and vanish in so short a time.  When
have they bent down over the ground and its disguise to contemplate
it?  When have they studied and tried to read the ground and its myriad
designs?
     In nature a broken twig is as beautiful and as important as the stars,
and it is mankind that decrees on beauty or ugliness.  Who has shown
the beauty of the sprigs and twigs, splinters, fragments, rubbish on the
ground?  Flooring, sidewalks, flagstones in plazas, the washed and
dried out ground of a river bed, the sand on a beach ending in a 
lace of underwater refuse, the innumerable scintillating, glairy, vegetal,
foaming, draped, red, metallic constellations-- all are transformed into
a sphere or a temple for dreamers alone.
     George L. K. Morris seems to have composed his paintings with
pieces, fragments, splinters, twigs.  In the dream of his work, a world
equal to the ground has come into being.  It is the ground of the giant
city that surges transformed from his paintings.  It is the macadam on
which the seedy stagger along and babble and flail their arms.  It is a
ground on which no flowers have been visible for so long.  A white
slab reminiscent of a tombstone, framed with bars, is surrounded by
forlorn signs.  A fragment of diamond-shaped flooring from a marionette
palace has slipped behind the white slab.  Three floor-planks are
carefully arranged like the three sisters yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
on the tombstone now.

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