How I Read Aloud, 7

[What makes those words come alive for an audience isn't the "ideal voice,"...]

       I think of Alexander Calder whose mobiles I fell in love with decades ago.  I even felt encouraged to try my hand.  It’s been fun but strictly amateur.  Whatever success I’ve had has, again, been due least of all to what people seem to think is most crucial about making mobiles, balance.  How does Calder get all those elements to balance that way?  How do you do it, people ask.

       Well, of course, the invention of the suspended, moving work of art is Calder’s, and he is a genius.  He is both engineer and artist.  But once the great brainstorm of the idea for mobiles was his (and he did elaborate the idea with great creative zest), the balancing of elements is fairly rudimentary at core.  It’s the wonderful elements themselves in their wide diversity of materials from mobile to mobile, the uncannily contoured shapes he created for a given mobile and the subtle variations in form within it, it’s the vibrant color choices he made for the elements, it’s the whimsicality of his imagination in both the creating and the naming of the mobiles, all these things that make Calders the wonders they are.  I can do the balancing, but it’s the “art” of the mobile I keep “having at” and which keeps escaping me.  That art I don’t know, but I would never have said to Calder, “How perfectly you balance all your mobiles!”