“I doubt it,” he said, when she dared suggest a different way of imagining the world.
Doubt can make us hard like a rock. Doubting this, doubting that, never having the courage to entertain the unlikely.

I was too embarrassed to admit – when we started the workshop – that I imagined licking things in the gallery. Faced with vulnerability and doubt, a canine quality crept forward; a literary-critical lick of becoming dog. How does the art taste? Is it tasteful?

Is this a fluffy, sloppy form of art criticism?
“No doubt”, he said.

: :

Here we are in a big rusty shell of an art-dog-house.
Barking ACCA: ‘Rusty’ the iron kelpie awkwardly poised on a plane of desert-gravel.
Inside, we are the growl of a dog’s stomach.
Shall we lick or howl?
Let’s see.

Here is a roughly rectangular-shaped lump of basalt, wearing underpants.
The back of the pants are a bit dirty, as if the rock was put down in an unswept corner shortly before finding its way to a pristine plinth.
Do the underpants render the rock more vulnerable than if it were naked?
It becomes a kind of person-rock, trying to hide the soft genital crevices it can’t possess. How does one touch a rock like that?
No. No touching here, and especially no licking.
But if I did lick it, could something soft – [even if not genitals] – be discovered?
What would it taste like? A dusty corner?
A cold earthiness?
Perhaps a lick of the rock would offer the taste of deep time – the flavour of when its hardening happened; when the volcanic lava cooled so quickly it became one of the hardest of rocks. What we might taste is that it was once soft – and, super-hot – perhaps more like the ooze of aroused genitals than I dared imagine.

So here we are, with a roughly rectangular bit of basalt in grubby underpants.
It took us all the way back in time, to the soft ooze of a volcanic eruption. Gone hard.
Lick that!

: :

What might the world become if we re-imagined it more often –
and tempered reality with it?
Reality does have a temper – and it’s often grumpy, especially if it lacks imagination.
When doubt howls, reality trembles. If vulnerability licks, reality trembles again, but it’s a different kind of quiver.

Doubt can be hard, but when graced with vulnerability it offers an allowance; a benefit.
Lick with the shudder, and taste the softness of the real.

“Next time”, she said, “can you give me the benefit of the doubt?”