How I Learn

Calls This

This blog seems to be difting towards being a poetry blog. If I knew myself a bit better this would not be surprizing, as poetry has long been an important part of how I learn. I have also reengaged with writing over the past few years, part of my response to being in a new situation, living in Boston and working in Cambridge MA with an interesting and engaged group of people. At the same time, some of my children's friends engaged in writing as well, and I have been able to learn a lot observing this.

A few weeks ago I was doing some work in the basement of our old Vancouver house (the house is 100 years old in 2010) and I can across a box of old manuscripts. One of these was a poem sequence Calls This that I wrote while in Tokyo in the mid 1980s. It was published in 1987 as issue 24 of Peter Ganick's magazine Abacus.

Rereading these poems after a long absence they still, surprizingly, work for me. Some of the language is a bit sentimental and naive, but I am still obssessed with many of these themes - voicing, silence, faltering communication, observing the other ... I may try to rewrite this sequence next year. As part of the rewriting, I want to share it here.

Calls This (1987 Version)

 

Water not the same

not of me

nor yet given completely

to its other

The water’s other self

(its surface) blind to chance

will not accept refusal

but shares its qualities completely

A quality of self

as fluid as

its source

knows no distinction

 

Completes all chances

equally alike

like death the water

bland to taste

 

that what I said was, and after

you took that from me

and went away.

part of the sky found

without light

and less distance

to believe in.

I followed anyway,

wanting to find

a way in then.

some fault in your voice,

a high note after rain,

that would let me remember,

escape,

all I had said.

like that dead chip

off the sky

you had kissed

then brushed away

in the silk

of your desire.

but what I said was

always held

and now

there is no way back.

for after

 

when after your looking

    you paused

covering your eyes

there was

    this again

this again after

the darkness passed

in pieces

broken from rain

the ability to place

mine in this

you the place of

a dry sound

part in sedge

the trembling

again

time for speech

I not kept

to this loss of air

or

 

a gesture might

    given

have been offered

like the present.

I, offered

a way past this

or testimony.

and taken, swallow.

eat. that too

is done.

the offer allowed

for appraisal

like some of us

imagined hope –

the will to drive back

necessary failure.

the taken places

present.

    this sembles a fictional

------------------------------------- gift to this

    dry stick in the mud

want holds a sacrifice

of part’s integrity

to a lesser whole

(a measuring

Against itself)

and what you want

you take

of what you need

you give but part

is isolate

and draw a thread of cotton

from your nose

down through the anus

made whole the measure

of your need

 

innocence or incoherence in the attempt,

I have a shelter.

The air too thin

To carry sound.

I’d not intended that.

a person placed

above me on the stair

has fallen, damaging his throat.

I call,

I call his loss

towards me

for the words it gives

he does not close his eyes.

nothing to hear,

the air is farther from our want

than we can give.

what I want from him

what he needs

the blood between us

innocent.

 

here is enough.

this a flatter part

of what is called,

not the suggestion,

endurance,

to what is borne.

what is part of a place

when that

cannot

be found.

ever found.

there was a sense

that here,

but enough was taken.

the soil

thinned

till duration.

like the film of your face

after death

is

mine again.

possession a last

part of place

belonging

for what is not.

 

I cannot speak

and say less

but there is no protection,

those who love me

repeat my failing.

injured figures

beckoning

across the pale,

the order of words

fixed

in the moment of light

and we are caught.

no accusal taken.

the white

impartial

gives nothing of itself

‘I love you”

fulfills our possibilities,

and you and you.

are taken from me.

what I would say

not say

that I might give to you

 

light no longer to the room

what thought was once to the skin,

the table bare apart from its utensils

resting

still water in a glass

sleeping

our skin marred with images –

like naming flowers in the darkness,

their scent

remembering weight.

a knife a heirloom a fork

arranged,

always arguing

balancing

water in the glass.

‘keep the light off’

broken,

there are enough names.

‘enough’ I said ‘I’ve had

enough’

‘it’s the pressure in air

causes silver to tarnish’

eventually even bone decays.

its fine edge of water

against roses?

 

(after Satie)

if a square of light on the page

is called yellow

what is blue?

or not blue

but refraction at the boundary.

a place to breathe.

the yellow square cut out

and glued to the sky

Denies its brilliance

while blue remains on the table

modulating

into black (or one of its sisters).

never enough light

in the room or vanishing sky

as dinner ends

to forgive the blue or make it

speak for itself.

a tinkle of cutlery against china.

I would allow the blue its yellow

with the tea.

the yellow speaks of black

but is this memory

or prophecy

(as sky is liable to).

the sky is yellow.

the sky black.

blue a variation on black played after

our melody is complete.

or in some place lost

between dinner and sleep.

 

an interval held

too long between breath

the intention to speak

your breath on my throat

or water in a glass

remain

part of what I know

the blood

quieter than water

the first sound

slips from your throat

onto my tongue

like a perch

unconscious in

the air we speak

I swallow the sound

of your refusal

and breath

draws blood

from my tongue

the interval

in our bodies

aged with water

a fish

gelid in the stream

would speak

 

may have this light

or other

shadow in it

shape of a hand’s

grey drift

a small room

without windows

clasping the shadow

of a hand

fixed on the wall.

searching the shape

of a door

some flaw in the light

as distance

in time

of a room’s shadow

edges into decay

a slip

in the shadowed light

like memory

of a door

the hand of memory

of past light

so severe

it blanketed distinction.

 

the occasional need

to accept disturbance

into one’s breath

and grasp a fragment

of the day.

the day a fragment of the self,

its broken mirror

of the other’s desire

for self

without its other.

and breath never alone.

always

as it is

filling

into a sky

the other, breath’s absence:

flight

allows the I

trilling

its right of refusal

to pass into pieces of sky

like cloud.

as cloud sky’s breath

the trill breath’s tool

to embroider absence

with intent.

and pass

in spaces of a day

the air drifts free.

 

that too and

something less

listening

a reed bunting

too far off

listening to

the to

gaps

is there

water by water.

the bunting pauses

closer

pausing

repeats its

call its

flighting

    are

there are

threads of reed

bunting its nest.

listening to

water

trip

drop by

again

 

the other day

today like

wisps of

nimbus of

the sky

to close

give

a reed bunting

by water

that too

and

you to

listening.

Priviliged Hands

This post is dedicated to the great Dutch marine biologist Geerat Vermeij who wrote a book with this title. Vermeij is blind and knows the world through touch, smell, taste and sound. He has trained his hands to recognize thousands of marine organisms, especially those of the littoral.

My own hands are clumsy and dull, but I learn a great deal through touch and by watching the hands of those much more skilled than I at work. One of the great pleasures of my time in Boston is that my wife Yoshie and I live in a very small walkup in the South End. When we are in the apartment at the same time we are close to each other and can see each other working. Yoshie works with her hands. She makes small, intimate objects by knitting wire forms then weaving in found materials - strips of paper from packing, plastic, bits of metal or heavier wires. Sometimes these are dull colours to give the wire patterns ground. Other times, the found objects can be magpie bright. The forms capture the movement of her fingers. Quick, deft movements, like a bird in flight, then sometimes slower, almost stopped, as she applies strength. The objects themselves are light and strong, supple and alive in the hand. Held up to the light they reveal something of their structure. Holding them in my own hands I remember the movements of the hands that made them. One more way of stitching together time. Hands hold a privileged form of memory.

As I travel I try to touch as many things as possible and remember textures and temperatures. We (or I) lack a rich language to describe texture. I wonder if one could create some kind of visual notation for touch, much in the way some modern composers have created new, more textural, ways to score music: grain, roughness, swirl, sharpness, continuity, concavity, figure and ground as felt in the finger tips, heft in the hand, static and friction, or slip and glaze. The touch of something that crackles. Wondering how to hold flow in ones hands. To know the tension in a string is to know how to touch movement.

Some things touched:

Slimy kelp

The warm rough head of a Jizo at Nishiaraidaishi

The haft of our favourite cooking knife

Yoshie's feet

An old metal bolt, some rust, about three kilograms

Crack in a rock face trying to hold

Rope burn as the sheet runs out too fast

Old chain grease with road grit

The smooth grid space of the keyboard

Orange peel

A fish still alive dieing in ones hand

A dog's soft ears

A child's hand

The same child's hand, years later, bigger and stronger than my own

Dust on the pages of a book

Smooth then rough bark of an Arbutus

A sweaty cheese

Paper cut

Oiled skin

A broom handle, a rake's

Clay soil

Sandy soil

Peat

Bulbs

Hands are the skin over muscles tied by tendon to jointed bones. Arthritic knots. Fine hairs showing the tension. The shape of a hand is its memories.

 

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.