Opening and Disclosure

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© 2002 R.C. Barajas

here is always that horrible moment. Just before a risk. A suspended moment before either crossing a threshold -- or tumbling into an abyss. Your feet may find a reassuring continuation of ground under them. Or they may end up pedaling madly in thin air, dragging you into the gaping maw that awaits those brave -- or witless -- forays that end in disaster.

Disaster defined here: sudden or painful death, sudden or painful embarrassment, strained or sympathetic politeness directed toward you, or a very sudden, very pregnant silence.

I was not really nervous until shortly before we left for the gallery. I had been too busy to get nervous. The show was gestating benignly, scrawled in the April section of my calendar, which, everyone knows, is years away from March.

First I was too busy working on the pieces themselves, dreaming, forming, stamping, mixing, drying, hemming, hawing, adjusting. Soon I was delightfully swamped by a rotating cast of visitors. I had dutifully hung the show two weeks earlier, and so was free to enjoy Washington DC at the height of cherry blossoming and tourist ooing and ahhing. I even got to feel the wisps of sultry air that sneak into the Mall about this time every year and warm the still frozen concrete facades of the museums. It was an engaging distraction.

But then it was Saturday, April 6, and suddenly it was all about me.

How could it not be, when I was the only name on the walls and floors of the small gallery? My inky little fingerprints were everywhere -- the emails, the invitations, the photography, the writing, the arrangement, and the Work.

That's where the abyss gaped. The Work.

Jesus. What if people hated the work itself? Found it trite, dull, oafish, or incompetent?

Wide and bottomless it threatened me -- this abyss in the shape of a grin.

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