Rough Ideas

On the margins of my walk small birds excite my dog. It’s like she just now registered their existence. Her exuberance at their presence seems lodged as a half-formed instinctual memory. Today she found a dead mouse–tossed it, rolled on it, and ran from me holding it gently in her mouth. The garden had been generous in ways she had never imagined. Nearby the milkweed stood tall, a weedy sentry to our antics.

On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.

— Mary Oliver, from On Winter’s Margin

These December days as I walk my circles with a six month old puppy I notice the gaps–the blue sky between the grey clouds on a blustery evening, the spaces between the bare trees as much as the trees in the morning blush of sunrise. It reminds me of Morandi’s still lives. How he painted space as much as objects. He captured the void, the warp, the curve, the table, and the wall.

“ I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late – there’s that rich possibility of noticing more in the meantime . . . poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

I do my decembrance project each year as a way to stave off my seasonal depression. In my fear of the darkening days I focus on the light. For years as I anticipate the shifting cycle of light I have been trying to find change in how I express myself. I aim to find new things to photograph. I make new backgrounds and alter how I approach my dread of the long nights.

This year I have accepted that there are things I revisit like the Osage-orange or the cardoon, the magnolia leaf and the oak. This is my harvest. This is when I count the seeds, notice the cold and find ways to enjoy it. By writing and photographing I have learned that I no longer need to huddle on a cold November rock. I can count down the days until the shortest day of the year. It comes fast and then I can breath a little easier because I know we are building up day-by-day again. And through all this I have found that what I most love are the months when day and night are even.

Everything tends towards its own circumference, it seems — the world, This life, and no doubt the next,
dependence and dear dread,
Even the universe in its spare parts.
As for me,
I’m ringed like a tree, stealthily, year by year, moving outward.

— Charles Wright, from Buffalo Yoga in Oblivion Banjo, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019; originally in China Trace, 1977

I rustled in slow circles this afternoon looking for just the right leaf. The huge curling litter of our Chinese magnolia is a marker of December for me. The leaves fall like yellow sails in November and then they dry, curl and blow in the wind. There was the year my father was visiting and in his failing eyesight he told me our newspapers had littered the field. Another year while stacking the wood kiln, my two helper friends took a break to gather armfuls of leaves. Their enjoyment of the amassed sculptural abundance drew me out of my funk of doubt.

Leaves beginning to rustle now
in the dark tree of the self.

–Charles Wright, from “Cicada,” in Chickamauga (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995)

Welcome to December and the first in a series of 21 images, some memories and a poem or a quote. As is often the case the beginning of December takes me by surprise.

Over the last few years of this project I often get a running start making a few images in advance so I can focus on ideas. This year I shifted an upstairs studio table to a new position so I can photograph with north light. The rest of the room is in disarray but I made a start.

I found boxes of old postcards, piles of letters, boxes of photographs, files from exhibitions, proposals, and notes for teaching jobs. I threw out paper samples and old unused tools. I vacuumed up dust and mouse nests, stink bugs and weird seeds collected for forgotten reasons. I found postage stamps, scissors, labels, brushes and rubber stamps.

I went through the accumulations of things that I used to throw out when I moved every couple of years. I went through memories and wish lists. I found attempts at articles and dreams of books, inspirational clippings and class evaluations, beginnings of paintings and sketches for projects that have been long since completed. There were cool things that could be used for new concoctions but have passed their expiration date. Some remnants of a few projects I got lost in that did not hold up to the test of time. Today was a good day to move on.

heron at twilight

stillness of dark lake séance

old spirit rises

— Greg Sellers, Haiku journal entry, 1 December 2020

Culturally today is the summer solstice and the summit of my series. We finished our firing this afternoon around 4:30. The firing is the summit of another series in my life. Today is the longest day of the year and as much as I love the summer, now I become a little sad to know the daylight hours get shorter from here. We have had hotter firings in terms of air temperature–it was hot firing in the kiln. We have had harder firings in how we had to fight for every degree of heat rise. We are thankful for the friends who are willing to forego some sleep and to wear long sleeve shirts and pants on these hot days. I learned of two deaths today and I am touched by the way both of these people brought meaning to my life. Their voices remind me that lighting a fire or swallowing ice are actions that weave threads of connection and meaning into our lives.

Basho wrote that the life of poetry means lighting a fire in summer, swallowing ice cubes in winter.

The moon is a waning crescent. The skies have been overcast the last couple of nights. Now the fog is floating in, so there are few stars. The kiln is hot and we have been tending, feeding, listening. It is almost as if firing a kiln was like eating stars, hot and peppery, full of patience and anticipation. We stoke, chat, eat, sleep, drink lots of water, and talk about what we get to eat next. More stars, cake? We watch the flame move through the space of the kiln. We look at the ceramic cones (that indicate temperature) and record the pyrometer temperature. At night the flame reaches out of the chimney like a bright mist or tongue.

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

–Rebecca Elson

We are in front of the kiln.

“We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”
—Sandra Cisneros

The front of the kiln is bricked up. A propane burner is propped in the base for preheat. Now is the moment when we look around, sit back on our heels and think about the seeds of ideas that are planted in the pots that are slowly warming up in the kiln. I know a lot of my artist and potter friends have found it difficult to work during, first, the pandemic and now the demonstrations and unrest. It’s been an incredibly beautiful spring. We can write about the flowers in our gardens, the weeds that persist with tenacity, and the creativity displayed in the way that they spread. We can look at nature not just to seek respite from the psychic battlefield, but also as a means to continue.

HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS

dear reader, with our heels digging into the good
mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something
about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself
but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown
& lord knows I have been called by what I look like
more than I have been called by what I actually am &
I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this
exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning
something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything
worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive
to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather
clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent
heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning,
you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

–Hanif Abdurraqib