All my life I have felt inspired by books. Some books inspire me to make my own books, some books inspire me to sing songs, like after I read Life is a Miracle and went around singing “Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry!” to the tune of “Cinderelly, Cinderelly” from the Disney movie. And some books inspire me to feed them to the dog. I like books, some books, but he likes books, all books.

So, I am inspired by books but variably so. If I want to feel invariably inspired I go not to books but to the earth. So endlessly inspired am I by the earth that once I even tried to make my own, and since I had a lot of paper (because of my book-making efforts) I used paper as my material. I made paper mountains, paper grass, panthers of paper, paper poplars. I cut out oblong shapes and folded them into dolphinny figures.

My paper world was pretty but there were no incidents. My paper cows never gave birth to baby paper cows, my paper puppy never tripped over her paws. My paper pineapples never got putrid; my paper marigolds never attracted paper bees who never collected paper nectar which they never turned into paper honey. My trees never got birdy, my ponds never got ducky, my woods never got wolfy.

My paper persons never got fussy or fumy or jokey. The big ones never put their feet in their mouths; the little ones never pounded on each other’s heads. They were predictable, like paper weather, and never got up and danced when I played the tambourine for them. They never plied each other with questions, never winced in pain, never wept for the paper people I crumpled up and threw away. My paper Keith Moon never smashed the paper tom-toms I made for him.

I have a hunch they had no hunches, and I noticed that their eyes never flashed. My people made of paper were inert next to people made of dirt; my earth made of paper was static next to the earth made of earth. From my experiment I concluded that aesthetically interesting, intricate worlds can be made out of paper — or plastic or wax or glass — but that the material of incident, of hunches and dances and manias and mistakes, and whatever makes our eyes flash — is something else. I concluded that the magic medium, the medium of surprise, is dirt.