This Is Not A Pipe….”Ceci n’est pas une pipe“, Magritte

I came across this pipe (which?). It was lying innocently on it’s side among a lot of other lost souls in a stall filled with castoffs of all description. So why, as I passed by, did this unnecessary object call out to me,  a call which I barely heard amidst the din of all the glittering and shapely spent objects? It was a pipe. And I heard that long remembered Magritte line;”Ceci n’est pas une pipe“. But it was.

When I saw it in my own collection it fell in with this brass and copper pipe, something that once might have been in the mouth of a fish, or a face on a fountain. One pipe weighs nearly nothing and is silk in the hand, while the other has gravity and weight, and is cold to the touch though warm to the eye. They seemed to want to be together. That suggestion coming to me was so timid as to be just below consciousness, but I heard it, the Zen Bell I always hear when it calls me. I’ve learned to listen for it.

On the hand made background (more about that some other time) they came to life and played together, and something like a force shivered between them, and they continued to fall against each other until I found their balance and poise. The cloth added a note as well. I was in thrall to the light, and the dark, and the way their character, independent of each other, and together, emerged.

I was taken in.