Ephemeral Art

I've been writing about beginnings and endings, that perhaps they're imaginary, they're just little steristrips of continuity. And as a blogger, I've always wanted my posts to follow one another in some sort of satisfying sequence, one evolving into the next. Continuity of time really helps with that, and lately I haven't had that. So I guess I'm proceeding in a more fragmentary vein--which has its own "fit", in that I've been writing about my work translating the dictionary, and thinking about how fragmented an experience of words and life a dictionary offers.
I've also been thinking about Ephemeral Art. This last Sunday was the Burning Basket celebration at Homer: a homegrown local festival celebrating all that grows here, creating a thing of beauty, an art object, from it, inviting people to write and tuck in notes listing what they want to let go of, what they want to celebrate...

Inviting the community to be present and witness, and celebrate with drumming and flowers and shared food...

 And then letting it burn to nothing, exploding with hidden sparklers, mimicked by poi-spinners and the caverns of drums.

So often when we make art, we are concerned that it should be lasting--last forever, even--and that it should affect or impact people in meaningful ways. But we often practice obscure arts, indoors, concealed inside pages, lasting only because it sits on a shelf or inside a hard drive or in "the cloud'. But this piece of ephemeral art gets the whole town out, practically, and people of all ages are just so into it. This is art that makes of itself an event. Even people who don't have any thoughts about art, or of fire as cleansing, or of praise for the plants that grew themselves and have been woven into this beautiful structure, are having an experience generated by the art.

As the leaves turned this week, as the temperatures are mostly below 50 degrees, as seeds sink and the harvest dwindles, I've been thinking how everything is ephemeral and everything is art.

Every year the oddly shaped roots for us to interpret as it strikes us.
The fireweed webbed in seeds, which seems impossible since the air has been filled with fireweed seeds for a month. Each cotton-candy spire a work of art.

Even a sample pack of two gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.

I ate one, a 60-calorie sub-in part of lunch. The chocolate chips, firm, spreading, stimulating. The matrix of
flours and gums and sugar and palm oil and natural flavors crunchy and evanescent, the snap of the crunch melting away as soon as it passes the teeth--a mirage, shimmering and waning. Pure art. Pure ephemeral art. For sixty calories you could have nine almonds or a small apple, or several carrots, or many other things that would be far more hunger suppressant. So why would I ever choose the cookie?
How many calories should one allow for art?
I don't know the answer.