ALL UPON A STONE

Fundamental, and fertile per se, is the idea of a single rock as a micro-environment: threaded through, in effect supplying a plot line, is the compulsive search of a mole cricket for another of his kind — a search that climaxes, after many creatures have been bypassed, in a primal outcry ("He crackled his loneliness. He crackled his whereabouts. He crackled his need. . .") and an awesome response: one after another flies up, drops down, gathering "as mole crickets do, not to mate, not to eat, but for reasons no one knows. Solitary creatures all the days of their lives, each leaves his earthen home on one festive night and rushes together with other mole crickets to dance, crackle and touch." An extraordinary interlude, upon a stone or anywhere — but on and around the stone there is a problem in the failure of the illustrations to depict clearly what is detailed in the text. For the artist had an idea too, of emphasizing "the unity of the microcosm" by painting the stone and its inhabitants as a whole, then actually enlarging the relevant sectors to accompany the story. Seen whole, the stone pulsates: seen separately, forms may be indistinguishable. It seems a stunt, especially for the young child who'll have trouble seeing the relationship of the parts to the whole (the whole being, remember, only 6fl x 7fl). Nonetheless and not the least, there is the mole cricket's plaintive crackling.