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.