to-ask-how-my-dissertation's-coming).
I like this fellow from Notre Dame --
-- and I'm going to see if my tattoo artist can work up a nice sketch based on it.
While googling for gargoyles, I ran across references to Marjorie Hunt's Academy Award-winning documentary The Stone Carvers. The film (and the accompanying book) examines the tradition of stone-carving via the lives and careers of several Italian-American artists who carved the sculptures and embellishments on the National Cathedral in Washington DC. It's a wonderful film; I watched it years ago when working on my Master's Degree in Folklore. It was so wonderful, in fact, that I dragged Mr. Badger, who is also a stone carver, in for a special screening of it. (The film was a "film" -- only available on 16mm -- so it wasn't as simple as smuggling the DVD copy home to watch.) In one of the most memorable scenes, a stone carver demonstrates his strength -- the strength that comes from years and years of labor with limestone and chisel -- by snapping an apple in two. He cups a red apple in his hands, presses his thumbs in towards the stem, and breaks the fruit neatly in half. Mr. Badger was most impressed and practiced this trick at home many times before mastering it. This, in his mind, more than any marble monument he could create, was the feat of a master stone carver.
As the cancer continues to run its course, his strength is all but gone. His tools and art supplies lie unused, his projects unfinished. The apples in my house are whole these days; it's my heart that's broken in two.
So I'm getting a gargoyle tattoo -- a gargoyle to sit on my shoulder and to keep away demons, a gargoyle inked into my skin, a reminder of my own stone carver, the fragility of life, and the durability of stone.
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