How I Learn

Sharing Things

 One way that I learn from my wife Yoshie is from the things we have around our apartment. We are living in a small fourth-floor walkup in Boston’s South End. The apartment is at the top of the building and puts us close to the sky. Yoshie brings many things home from our walks, or sees things in small pieces and cuttings that most people (myself included) would throw away. Studying these things, or just having them in the periphery of awareness as I work, infiltrates and shapes my thought in ways I am just beginning to understand.

I am not sure where this hour glass came from but it has become an important part of my mornings. I am usually up before dawn and one of the first things I do is turn this and let the grey sand begin to trickle down. By May there is usually some light and a tracing of bird song in the air by the time the sand is all at rest in the bottom of the glass. It is not quite an hour glass, it runs through a cycle in about 49 to 53 minutes. I am not sure what causes the variation, perhaps humidity.

 

 

Our apartment is full of the ends of things --- bits of wire, cloth scraps, notes with a few words, bike parts, whatevers. One thing one finds quite often is the slowly drying roots of foods we eat. The white rootlets of green onions are often lined up along the mantle in a study of how form is sharpened as an object dries. These are the roots from a couple of heads of red cabbage, several months old by now. They are dry and a bit brittle, and though you can’t see it in this photo (all the photos in this post are my own clumsy efforts) the way in which the leaves join with the stem can be seen much better than it could back when we were eating this in fall salads.

 

The painting is from my childhood. It is by Brenda Wallace, a close friend of mother’s, who for many years had one of the most interesting galleries in Montreal. I grew up dreaming about these shapes, and brought the painting back to Boston from Ottawa almost a year ago. It is on the bookshelf above the hour glass, the cloaked forms giving depth to the wall and a way back into memory.

Most weekends Yoshie and I will go for a long walk somewhere around Boston. We often take a train first, the commuter rail system around Boston is quite wonderful for getting out of the city and seeing the small New England towns that are so much the social fabric of Massachusetts. I ride through many of the same towns on my longer bike rides, but walking (especially with Yoshie) is a different experience. I hope that over the decades, as the car culture fades away, that the Lower Mainland of British Columbia will grow a network of small towns like this. The scale is human and democratic. This tin can was picked up on the road from Brockton station to the Fuller Craft Museum. I pinned the shoe insert underneath it to remind us of the walk.

Anything that reminds one of the sea and its wrack is good. Yoshie found this piece of rope on the beach at Rockport on Cape Anne. For some reason it makes me think of Richard Serra’s work, though I have no idea why. It also brings back memories of sailing trips. Once, many years ago, we were motoring south outside of Tokyo Bay in a thick fog and a dead calm, skirting the coast of the Chiba peninsula to stay out of the shipping lanes. We fowled a large water-logged cable, and I spent half an hour in the April ocean with a knife cutting us clear. That was as cold as I ever need to be. The rope on our wall, with its frayed ends and faint sea stink, has two tight splices, quite well done, the work of strong hands.

Yoshie works with her hands and there are usually small examples of her work here and there on the table or counters. Her main work desk is covered with the tools of her trade. Small pliers and hammers, scissors, files, crotchet hooks and the materials she works with – industrial paper and packing materials, wires, bits of plastic, small beads and strange little plastic knick-knacks in well organized patterns. I could spend a long time thinking about these patterns and what she keeps in hand’s reach. Most of my own work is with words or in conversations. It helps me to see the small tools she works with and it reminds me how important the hand and human touch is to shaping the mind.

  Sometimes she hangs her work on the wall in the entrance hall. Coming home and finding new forms on the wall sparks all sorts of new ideas for me. The piece on the left here was made for an exhibition on art made from found objects. It includes egg cups, old gold brocade, and the knit wire forms that Yoshie is known for. Hanging there, with the door to the fuse box as background …

People who work with me know that I like to have books around. I even read some of them. Being able to walk into a room and see the patterns of ideas suggested by a collection of book spines is a special joy, and I like to watch how the sequences of books on the shelves evolve over time. I tend to pull twenty or thirty books off our stacks over the course of a week. I may not actually read any of these, just glance through the index or read a few pages. Sometimes it is just the colour of the cover that catches my eye. At some point the books have to go back on the shelves and I usually just deposit them in groups wherever they happen to fit. So the books found together are sometimes a good picture of my interests at a point in time, until they get shuffled back into the general shelves, pulled out for more careful reading, or given to friends. I wonder how this will work for me with eBooks. I expect to use a Kindle or some similar device soon, if only to leave some room in the apartment for something other than books.

This yellow construction was also picked up on the shore of Cape Anne on a trip soon after we moved to Boston. I think it broke off a piece of fishing equipment. Cape Anne is important to us for its association with the port Charles Olson, who lived many of his most productive years in the major fishing port of Gloucester. We use it to prop the back door open (the door opens onto a deck some fifty feet above the back gardens, level with the tree tops). Sometimes I bring this piece of scrap to the table and keep it by me as I work. The worn yellow with corrosion showing through, the repeated cubes, the combination of past use and present, what, something anyway, helps me to focus and keep going. The sea is a hard way, and people who fish have more knowledge and make a harder effort at greater risk than most of us. This piece of scrap, picked from the rocks with a large sea running, seems to me as important as any work I am likely to do.

After Thirty Years

This September will be Yoshie Hattori's sixtieth birthday. We have been together now for thirty years and in that time she has shaped my life, perceptions, freindships and thought. Living with her has changed how I learn and who I share my learning with. I have been thinking about this a lot since we moved to Boston and Yoshie began to share her photos more widely through her blog itis, which she describes as "Photos and other scannings of what I see as it is. A record of patterns, rhythms, reflections."

Living together has changed how I see, what I taste, the ways I touch, how I experience places and how I speak.

Sight

Walter Benjamin described photography as the 'technology of the optical unconscious.'  Photographs capture what we see but often fail to notice, the underlying fabric of the world that helps us continue across each day's haze. Yoshie's photos help me to pause and look more closely.

Part of this is the spatial rhythms she experiences so strongly in a sky (here and here), a wall, a ceiling, a window a door or just hanging there. Each place, day, moment, glance has a rhythm. Being able to see these rhythms helps me, anyway, stitch the days together and get out of the blur and pressure of a life that seems to always be leaving too much behind.

Leaving too much behind and unnoticed. There are traces of things everywhere we go. The imprint of a newspaper on a sidewalk or an idea stiched into the pavement. When we renovated our old house in Kitsilano she saw things in the debris or left on the walls. There is intimacy in the details that follows in surprizing places.

And in all of this detail there is a world of signs, from footprints in East Vancouver, to a choice of directions or written in light.

Today, when I walk or cycle, much of what I see I see through Yoshie's eyes. I notice more details, and my movement opens into the larger rhythms of sight. But her photos still surpize me, and I am often puzzled when she stops, spends minutes looking, sometimes it seems as if she is waiting, and I am often waiting (hopefully with a book to read), and I am still waiting, to really see. Something has opened for me.

Taste

A big part of our life together has been preparing food and eating together with family and friends. It is one of the things I miss most about not being in Vancouver, our big Zawazawa Kitchen and all the people that come by for dinner.

Living together for thirty years we have blended our sense of taste but most of what is best in how we cook comes from Yoshie. One can see this in our salad dressings.

Yoshie Style

• A neutral oil, usually grapeseed, sometimes with a touch of a nut oil if more depth is needed from the oil
• A flavoured vinegar, often the tarragon vinegar that Micheline Gill taught her, but sometimes a rice vinegar or an apple vinegar
• Shallots
• Sea salt

Steven Style

• Olive oil or a mixture of oils that includes a nut oil
• A fruit acid, usually from lemon (with a bit of the zest) or raw 100% cranberry juice to be local
• Shallots and sometimes a white onion or a red onion or a bit of garlic
• Sea salt

The approach is Yoshie's. She has taught me to keep it simple, focus on clean flavours that will call to each other, and pick up the high notes of the season.

It is often hard, but we are slowly getting better at cooking together. (Shouldn't this be easier after so many meals?) Learning to cook together and accept each other's place in the kitchen is probably a good metaphor for our whole relationship. We are both stubborn, passionate, controlling and we want desperately to share, to understand and to be understood.

Everyday that we cook together I discover a new taste - how roasted eggplant combines with apple vinegar - yuzu mixed into salt - the flesh along the backbone of a grilled sardine - tomato just tomato sauce.
 

Touch

Our home is filled with random objects.

• A sheet of paper, torn along the bottom edge, pinned to the wall

• Bark fallen from branches

• Tiny hammers, pliers, needles

• Strange shapes of coloured plastics

• The normal mixture of seeds, stones, dried flowers

• The bottom roots of onions, garlic, leeks ...

All of these are interesting to look at, but they are more interesting to touch, to see with one's fingers. Seeing with one's fingers gives a better idea of what they have been and what they can become.

Yoshie began to knit when she was three years old and hasn't stopped. Over the past few years she has been knitting small things using wire, bits of paper, strips of discarded plastic, and beads. The use of circles, mix of materials and questioning of form reminds me of Eva Hesse. The shapes have become organic, reminding me of Ernst Haeckel's drawings of sea creatures. This makes sense to me as both Haeckel's drawings and Yoshie's knittings have helped me understand a little more about the evolution of form. Holding one lightly in my fingers it is surpizingly firm and pliable. Rubbing it gently the different textures blossom into intimate worlds. In small things there is more than words can say, so "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 

Place

I lacked any deep sense of place until Yoshie and I had lived together for several years. She is deep rooted and staying with her has helped me grow my own roots, tangled in with hers, and searching together for the nitrogen fixers we need to grow.

There are many places that are part of our life together,

• Rubbing noses in the winter cold
• A waterfall in Kyoto
• The beach in Copenhagen
• The house, now gone, in Kohoku and
• The levy where we often walked
• And walking in Senjogahara 
• The harbour at Katsuyama
• Or anchorage off Dai-Ni-Kaiho
• Our house in Kitsilano
• The beach below it
• Gastown where we worked, have friends and where Kaito works today
• Another anchorage, this one in the Gulf Islands
• Widgeon Slough where we still canoe
• The deck of our apartment in the South End
• A restaurant in Sestri Levante
• Where and ever we can be together

Speech

When we are alone together Yoshie and I speak an odd jumble of Japanese and English, with the occaisional French or Swedish term thrown in. Our children understand most of it, and maybe a few friends who are also bilingual in English and Japanese and who have shared parts of our life. It makes sense to us to say things such as

"The plant's tendril is guru guru around the wire."

"Maa, kore wa chotto too abstract to act, dakara shirabte hou ga ii."

"The rain smells sabishi."

Translation is a large part of my life but the translations that matter the most to me are those that expose the gaps between languages - almost any translation of Paul Celan for example. Living in two languages is a constant exploration of those gaps, a pulling apart and then stitching together. Sometimes the threads snap, and sometimes the gap is too wide to close without pain. What does close the pain, after thirty years, is our friendship.

Friendship

And loss.