A brief visit from the muse

Several people have asked me lately if I’ve been writing. Um…no. Not really. I’ve fallen into the bad writerly habit of waiting for the muse. Something you’re never to do. The muse is fickle, unreliable. It’s only the steady, persistent hard work at the desk that results in a body of work. I don’t know that I have another “body of work” in me, though lately I’ve been browsing through my old blog posts, from the years when Jack and I drove to Mexico and I commented along the way. There’s some interesting stuff there that might lead to something more. But that’s not yet clear to me, and it might take more steady, hard work at the desk than I feel inspired to do. There I go…apparently I’m relying on inspiration rather than persistence. So be it. It’s a time of life to let things unfold as they will.

But sometimes the muse does show up, and when she does I’ll continue to share. Here’s a little piece that “came” to me recently, inspired by my daughter’s memory of the object that is featured here.

Objet d’art

Sometimes I find myself staring longingly at a beautifully framed photograph or a stunning watercolour at an art sale, and I remember a Christmas years ago when we gave my parents a painting accompanied with a box of plaster we’d labelled “instant wall”. That’s what I’d need if I succumbed to temptation.

Gazing at the prints and paintings that decorate my home, I remember when and where I acquired each. And I think about a day when I may live with both fewer walls and less artwork. I also remember the things they replaced. The “Make Love Not War” poster featuring a pair of copulating rhinos. The faux-oil

painting of a couple of eggs in a frying pan. A couple of classic but cheaply reproduced Picassos. A take-off on Warhol’s famous tomato soup can, this one with a bullet hole spurting blood and a now-forgotten peace slogan. It was the Vietnam War era.

Oh yes, and the restaurant-sized tin of mashed bananas, a sculptural objet d’art that we found in the basement of our rental house in 1968. 

The label on the giant can was reddish-brown with the words KRAFT MASHED BANANAS in white and yellow surrounded by half a dozen bananas, the bottom two forming a pelvis-like shape. On the back, recipes for banana cream pudding, banana icing, banana-mallow pie. My husband’s inner artist, which had been lying dormant for some time, sprung to life. If tomato soup was art, why not bananas? Pop art. Punk art. Found art.

Phallic symbolism aside (though it never was; we were young), the humour inherent in the concept of canned mashed bananas was key to the artistic value of the objet (as it came to be known). What is more easily mashed than a banana? And isn’t the very concept of a processed banana symbolic of our cultural demise, our reluctance to exert even the slightest effort to achieve the desired results? Or so I explained to visitors who raised their eyebrows at this curious piece of home décor. 

Also, its seven-pound four-ounce weight exactly matched the birth weight of our daughter, born that very year. That had to mean something.

For years, the objet moved with us from house to house, occupying a spot on a book shelf, or displayed solo as a focal point. As happens with the things surrounding us every day, I ceased to pay it much attention until one day I noticed a bulge in the can and began imagining an eruption of putrid pureed bananas in the living room—a room that by then had evolved to feature artwork of a style not entirely consistent with an over-sized can of fruit.

And so, it was with sorrow and ceremony that we finally disposed of it—but not before removing the label, which I recently found tucked in a yellowed folder entitled, in Jack’s handwriting, “sentimental hogwash”. It shared space in the folder with an envelope containing my first grey hair, a couple of our daughter’s baby teeth, various drawings and writings by the young geniuses who were our children, and a number of old documents we must have felt sentimental about at one time.

I always considered the can to be a joke, but it was never clear that Jack didn’t actually see it as “found art”, a la Warhol. It was he who continued to insist that it occupy a space in our home, and he had a way of blurring the line between the silly and the serious that often kept me guessing. In any case, it had to go. Tossing it over the edge at the local dump that day, sometime in the 1980s, felt like a rite of passage. A farewell to the irreverent, thumb-your-nose playfulness of youth.