First Fire: The Maker's Ascent
First Fire: The Maker's Ascent:
As I continue to develop my writing chops in describing my own artistic aspirations, I decided to go outside myself and attempt writing a piece with Apollinaire’s voice. First Fire is about the constant internal struggle that many artists and creatives like myself deal with.The idea was sparked by my recently watching the Genius-Pablo Picasso series on Amazon.
Guillaume Apollinaire, a close friend of Pablo Picasso, was
a poet, playwright, art critic, and novelist who defied traditional forms and
embraced the dynamism of modern life. He championed Cubism, Futurism, and
Orphism, advocating for art that captured the fragmented, sensory experience of
the industrial age. His poetry, characterized by its innovative use of
typography, imagery, and sound, sought to break down the barriers between
different art forms. Apollinaire's work, often infused with a sense of wonder
and surrealism, celebrated the beauty and chaos of the modern world.
Apollinaire on "First Fire: The Maker's Ascent"
by Marc Staples
"The Anvil's breath, a lungful of rust and starlight,
exhales a new dawn—a dawn of gears and molten poetry. Hands, stained with the
ochre of the earth, the cobalt blue of the arc-weld, and the crimson of
blood-tinged sweat, dance a mechanical ballet, a choreography of sparks and
sinew. They sculpt not mere objects, but the very echoes of human desire, the
tangled wires of memory, the blueprints of forgotten gods.
The furnace yawns, a crimson mouth, a Cyclopean eye,
devouring the past, its rigid forms and polite lies, spitting out the future in
molten fragments, shards of raw potential. From the shattered mirror of
tradition, where the reflected image of man was always a pale imitation, new
forms emerge, crystalline and brutal, whispering secrets in the language of
sparks and steam, a dialect of hammers and heat.
These are not craftsmen, but alchemists of the everyday,
transmuting the leaden weight of existence, the mundane and the monstrous, into
the gold of pure sensation, a symphony of steel and skin. They carve their
dreams into steel girders that reach for the sky, weave their nightmares into
wire tapestries that shimmer with electric ghosts, and fire their hopes in the
kiln of the human heart, a furnace fueled by the very essence of longing.
The hammer's song, a syncopated rhythm of creation, a jazz
of metal and muscle, drowns out the static of the machine age, the drone of
conformity. The raw scent of burning metal, a perfume more potent than any
garden of artificial blossoms, fills the air, a heady fragrance of
transformation. Here, in the crucible of sweat and inspiration, where the
boundaries between flesh and metal blur, the human spirit, forged in the fires
of 'First Fire,' ascends, a phoenix of steel and bone, leaving behind the ashes
of yesterday, the dust of forgotten forms.
A thousand eyes, made of polished steel, reflect the dawn of
this new age, an age where the human hand, guided by the heart's wild compass,
shapes the very fabric of reality. Here, in the heart of the forge, where the
past and future collide in a shower of sparks, 'First Fire: The Maker's Ascent'
begins, a symphony of creation, a testament to the enduring power of the human
spirit to forge its own destiny from the raw, untamed elements."
