If you know how to treat it

It looks like a metal sphere that somebody stepped on. Squashed. About two inches in diameter, dark and mottled and scratched and bumpy. Unremarkable, the kind of thing you probably wouldn't notice.

Then you pick it up.

It sings. A note or two. Sprightly, from far away.

If you're curious, you hold it to your ear. After a while, it stops, like a wind chime after a breeze dies. A turn or two in your fingers produces more notes - eerie, otherworldly. A more vigorous shake produces an ethereal chorus, minor in character if utterly unidentifiable.

Smack it against something hard, and that chorus turns angry and somehow gorgeous.

All from inside this ugly little welded thing.

Once I saw it, once I held and hefted it - once I heard it - I had to have one.

"Stardust" is perhaps the most widely known creation of a Nebraska artist named Reinhold Marxhausen, a polymath art professor at Concordia University in the small town of Seward.

Marxhausen made art out of all kinds of stuff - he painted, welded, sculpted. He has two mosaics in the Nebraska state capitol. He made stained glass windows for St. John Lutheran, the church across the street from his college. He corralled sound and crafted it. He created, relentlessly.

He died a few weeks ago, at the age of 89. I never got to thank him.

I'm sorry for that.

From stories told about him, Marxhausen was both a mischief-maker and a mentor, a guy who centered the chaos around him, some of which he created and all of which he fostered and celebrated. The kind of professor we all wish we'd had.

His art even now surprises and challenges, and not only because of how wide it ranges - from conventional watercolors to what he called a "manual walkman" - a metal helmet with wires sticking out that the wearer could strum.

If the phrase "performance art" leaps to mind, it should. In 1981, Marxhausen delivered a speech at St. John school's Wednesday chapel - while standing in a coffin he'd built:

"This box is a symbol.

"A new space capsule for my meeting with God.

"A great new adventure lies before me.

"This box reminds me every day of God's grace and love.

"May it be for you also."

I was talking to the pastor who told that story at Marxhausen's memorial, the Rev. Scott Bruick, and it struck me: The Stardust had been near me for decades, a constant, a reminder. Somehow I'd missed that resonance all these years.

So here it is, as direct as I can make it: A Stardust is plain. Almost homely. But it is also inexpressibly beautiful if you know how to treat it. If there is a finer metaphor for human ambition - even the human condition - I'm not sure I know of one.

Plus, it fits in your pocket.

I first saw a Stardust in a friend's fingers, decades ago.

He was fixed on it, eager, alternately shaking it and holding it to his ear, joy in his face as the singing stuff inside wound down and went silent.

I spent my last few dollars on one in a strange shop near the water in Georgetown.

I gave it to the woman I love on our first Christmas together. Like every gift, like all great art, I wanted it to explain things, things I think I now know but didn't know then.

I wanted this squashed metal sculpture to sing what I could not say.

After all these years, it still does.

Donald Luzzatto is The Virginian-Pilot's editorial page editor. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.