The Artist Laughs

Puzzle: Something difficult to understand or explain; a game to test ingenuity or knowledge. A 16th century concept. Origin unknown.

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A jigsaw puzzle…the equivalent of a nuclear explosion of a rainbow. There’s no surer way to drive someone to drink than being chained to a chair trying to assemble one. Metaphorically speaking, it’s a little like life…and a lot like understanding women!

Ours was one of those hate-to-open Christmas gifts, a last-minute Amazon leftover. Like LOV’s (leftover vittles) in your refrigerator---the best has been eaten, but conscience won’t let you discard the remainder until it grows hair or turns green.

We spread it out on the card table and throw the box away. Yes, the same box that has the only clue to the image. Ever try to put a puzzle together without a picture?

For days it lies there in obscure incongruity, all 10,000 bits and pieces of it…colored shapes, squares, circles, triangles and other indescribable configurations. No discernible pattern. It’s like the Original Chaos, void and formless, waiting for a Voice to give it life. One piece stands out. It’s a brilliant, sun-kissed golden circle. Clearly it’s the puzzle’s crown.

Like life, we start from scratch, mostly guessing. It seems hopeless. It incites frustration. Razor-edged tongues lacerate normally benign family members. All agree it’s the work of the devil.

What kind of brain could concoct such a torturous mystery? Can you imagine the mental horror of a serial ADHD personality trying to piece it together? Being lashed to a pyre and incinerated in public would be preferable.

Figuring out these puzzles is cruel and unusual punishment. Somewhere, maybe in caves, bleary-eyed sociopaths sit in cubicles staring at screens. They hear voices from the ethereal realm. Weird designs emerge, flash-backs of Jackson Pollack’s canvasses. Even Einstein would have bitten his nails.

But let’s say you get tired of looking at this silent anarchy and decide to assemble it. So what? Who’ll care? All that wasted time to end up with an image of the Duck Dynasty clan, or the Three Stooges or, heaven forbid, Dennis Rodman, with his diamond-studded pierced lips, kissing Kim Jong-un.

Think about it. Ten thousand pieces of graffiti, screaming for attention. It’s worse than sitting in the smoking section of a truck-stop diner or next to a table of squealing babies. It’s all fits and starts, no-fits and misfits. It’s the proximate cause of spousal discontent.

In a hurry? Forget it. It’s designed to make you fidget and irritable. Even your dogs will slink off.

Logic? In your dreams. It’s like life itself…fits together one piece at a time. Hours are years. They drag by. Like a runaway nightmare, a slight icon slowly emerges, a corner here, one there. It gives hope, like a golfer’s hole-in-one shot. It keeps him coming back, spending more money, wasting more time and seeking more bragging rights.

Don’t try jumping to early conclusions. Or taking shortcuts. Totally useless. It’s like trying to read the dealer’s poker face in a high-stakes game of Texas Holdem. Or identifying animals in ever-changing swirls of cumulus clouds on a hot summer day.

We attempt to guess the Artist’s mindset, the motive and the construct model. It’s inscrutable. It only leads down dark alleys. Each seemingly irrelevant piece has a set purpose. If one’s left out, the image distorts. In the distance the fat lady croons, “too soon, too soon.”

After we have suffered enough, our puzzle yields some final clues. The picture resembles a rust-colored Mojave sand dune. Illusions of movement hint of a hot spirit, always blowing like the wind. It creates and recreates the dune’s character. Something strange lies solitary atop of this pile of dust. It’s a sun-bleached bone. It resembles a human rib.

A few more pieces remain. We get excited, but still perplexed. They begin to fall into place. At this stage it’s usually easy to come to a reasonable conclusion of the puzzle. But not this one. The shining gold segment is waiting for its cameo performance. And it gets it.

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We gather around the table and flip a coin. It decides who concludes this marathon assemblage. The winner, with a degree of flourish, inserts the golden fragment. It forms a perfect halo over the rib bone.

Etched into the bone is a simple caption. It reads, EVE. Somewhere in the distance The Artist is laughing….

Bud Hearn
January 27, 2014


Illustration courtesy of Leslie Hearn, who now has several books of her sketches available. Let me know if you’d like one.