in Social Lounge by | A parable about art, beauty, and blame. |
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From time to time, Polaris speaks in parables and stories. This is a wonderful short story about a brickmaker, art, beauty, and blame, which was told when a question was asked about the nature of blame. For your enjoyment, we've included the audio, so you can hear the story as it was told. It runs about 9 minutes.
(Note: you can automatically download this into iTunes by clicking on this iTunes subscribe link)
The Parable of the BrickmakerThere once was a man who made bricks. Every day, he vowed to make 100 perfect bricks. He made these bricks of clay, sand, and water. And every day he baked his bricks in the sun, hoping to achieve a certain sharpness to the edges and the corners: a certain sense of perfection.
Every day after he had made 100 bricks, he took the bricks that he had made in days past that were now dry, hard and ready to be used and he stacked them. He stacked them not in towers, but in intricate patterns, building an ever longer, ever taller wall around his home, which was also his workshop.
 This wall began to take shape. It had form. It had curve. It had beauty. The man varied the pattern of the bricks, each identical to the next, in such a way that the light would fall upon the pattern of bricks that he laid in this long, sinuous, curving wall. The light would fall upon it and create patterns, pictures that could be seen when the light from the sun fell at a certain angle towards dusk. The people coming from the fields to the village nearby would see this wall take shape and form each day, as they wound their way along the path that went past the brick maker's house. Every day they saw the form in the wall take shape - the light from the sun falling on the patterns of the shadows to create a picture. At first, most of the villagers did not notice the patterns. They simply noticed that there was a wall. Then they began to notice that the wall had a pleasing artistic effect. But they did not notice the overall message in the pictures on the wall until the following year. As winter came, the villagers went to the fields less often. They stayed in the village more as there was no work to be done in the fields after harvest. In early spring, however, the wall had grown, because the brick maker had not been idle all winter the way the farmers were.
And so they began in spring - as they were now plowing and sowing the fields - to see the shapes that had begun to manifest in the long, sinuous, artistic wall. They saw themselves reproduced in the shadows in the patterns of the bricks. They saw themselves doing things that they did not dream anyone else knew about.
Everyone saw their worst aspects in the wall that the brick maker had made.
The villagers no longer wanted to pass by this wall - not at this time of day. They stayed later at the fields until it grew dark and came home weary, tired and frightened past this wall. One by one the villagers decided that something needed to be done, for each was sure that everyone else in the village could see his own worst attribute. Rather than change his attribute and become honest, forthright or kind, each villager decided in his own heart that, "no - what must be done is to tear down the wall." They did not speak of this among themselves, but out in the fields during the day when the sun was bright and their fears were behind them, the villagers did start to talk about the brick maker.
They talked about the quality of his bricks that was now "so much more poor" than it had been in the past. They talked about his kindness or that he was now charging more for his bricks than he should be.
They blamed the brick maker for their own fears of failure and of ugliness.
Even though they decided nothing outright, under the cover of one moonless night, they gathered beneath the wall of the brick maker in the middle of the night. Each villager had found himself there without knowing that anyone else would be there. Each villager saw the tools, hammers and heavy clubs in the hands of all the other villagers. When they saw one another gathered there, they knew what they must do.
They tore down the wall.
They tore down the magnificent piece of artwork that the brick maker had built. For, in truth, what he had built simply were patterns that pleased himself. The patterns were random: sometimes symmetrical, sometimes not. But they never meant anything in particular to him. They simply were pleasing patterns that made light and shadow, and broke up the monotony of a solid flat wall.
The villagers crept home that night, sure it that their deepest fears would not be brought to the light of day.
When the brick maker awoke in the morning, he saw the pile of bricks and rubble that his wall now was. He set out to make his hundred bricks that day. When he was done, he took some sand in one hand and clay in another, and simply brought his two hands together, forming between his hands the essence of what a brick was for him: something solid, something flowing - the two things that together create form, shape and art.
The next day there were enough bricks made for him to start again, making a new wall. And that's what he did.
Polaris concluded with a thought imbedded in this story:
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