Rough Ideas

Today I gave a Zoom talk in conjunction with my exhibit at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects in NYC. I wanted to keep my focus on the shadowy qualities of my woodfired work. But Steven brought up a momentary focus on blue. Mikio had visited my studio when I was working on black glaze tests. He saw a small bowl that had come out with a deep blue as dense as gravity. Mikio lit up like the full moon when he stumbled upon it. “This is what I want!,” he exclaimed. I tried to dissuade him, believing that blue is such a cliche in ceramics, but he convinced me to make him a series of shallow bowls. Despite my fears, the deep blue with soft concentric ridges sparkled in the dark restaurant like it was the heart of night. They were used at first with a white sashimi sliced so thin you could see the color of the glaze through the fish. In a later incarnation of gentle contrast they were used to serve fresh fruit for dessert.

“What does the heart of night have to say? It dares you to enter its perilous uncertainty. I used to fear that below the shadows were more shadows, a dark so dense its gravity, at some point, would grow inescapable. (It was for Pizarnik, who swallowed a handful of Seconal, a pill to treat insomnia, and went to sleep forever.) But the moon opens the night jar of the heart and inside, beneath the layers of fear and shame, lives another form of light. It does not glow like moonlight and it does not shine like sunlight. It is like no light any of us have seen with our eyes, a light like bells. When the moon draws out the shadows it can guide us to this light in the darkest center, in every heart pulse and in every pause that breaks the eternity of a sleepless night. There it is, this light, and it is—can I say it? Why this shame? This light, brave animal, can I say it? It’s love.”

–Nina MacLaughlin from Long Night Moon, The Paris Review, 12/17/2021

This month I have been resurrecting small pieces of memory about Mikio. It never occurred to me to think of these little jigsaw pieces as stories but they are. I remember when he came to visit us in Maryland. It was cold outside. I was nervous about having to cook dinner for someone who owns a hip restaurant. We lived in a tiny house. It had once been the separate summer kitchen for the farmhouse next door where our landlords lived. The night before Mikio came two left hand burners on the electric stove went on the fritz. Given that one burner had never worked that meant we were down to one. I still had to come up with a dinner. Later it turned out that a mouse had electrocuted himself, spread-eagled between the contacts for the burner switches. I put some sweet potatoes in the oven and baked trout in aluminum foil packets filled with the last bits of dill from our garden. We also cobbled together a small salad. Mikio was so impressed by the simplicity of the potatoes it was as if he had never before had sweet potatoes.

The next day we went to the studio three miles down the road to talk pots and review what I had been making. These memories demand accuracy, which is sometimes fleeting. The fibrous nature of smell, the waning light of a short day and the consistency of clay triangulate the specifics of my memories.

Memory demands so much,
it wants every fiber
told and retold.
It gives and gives
but for a price,

–Denise Levertov, from Memory Demands So Much, in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, New Directions, 1999

When I made my first round of pots for Mikio and Omen in 1982 I thought it was a one time thing. I couldn’t see into the future of a year, much less fast forward to 2021. It is in my nature to question and to swim through doubt. Mikio surprised me by continuing to ask for more. Sometimes he would call us up and say, “we are changing the menu for the next season; could I come visit and pick out some new pots?” Those trips were always a revelation. Perusing our shelves he might find beauty in plates I saw as failures because they were too flat or rough. He might choose to use the extras I had edited out of the first round of making. One time he took tiles to use as a plates. Another time what I thought were cups became small bowls. He was always imagining new uses for objects I had made with other intentions. It was a small thrill to see the pots transformed through use.

This afternoon was very warm for December. I did a little garden clean up. When my energy flagged I made a coffee and took it down to the dock on the pond. The trees across the way are bare, the colors muted but rich in the thin December light. Through my work with Omen and the food they serve I have come to understand the shifts in seasons on a micro level not only as I take my daily walks in Virginia but as the pots are used with seasonal ingredients in the restaurant in New York City.

“It’s my nature to question, to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this … It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy, there will be sorrow … The acknowledgement of the fully complex scope of being is why good art thrills.”

–Jane Hirshfield from an interview The Fullness of Things with Krista Tippett, “On Being,” December 16, 2021

In 2017 we had a dinner for fourteen which Mikio named The White Evening. It was a celebration of our collaboration over 35 years. Omen has been a meeting of minds, hearts, families, and tastes. Our group assembled and experienced a meal that was a beautiful cross between a parade and a feast. We enjoyed the company and the recounted stories.

For instance the gallerist Peter Freeman described how years ago he was planning on having a dinner party at Omen for one of his gallery artists. Mikio invited him to have dinner at the restaurant on a crowded night to discuss the planned meal. Despite the crowd, all night the table next to them sat empty. Towards the very end of the meal Mikio asked Peter if he would like to talk about the dinner and what they would have. Peter said, “of course.”

One of the waiters began to bring empty plates, setting them down on the table next to them. Peter didn’t initially understand why was he looking at bare plates. But as Mikio picked up each plate Mikio could imagine the potential composition. Mikio described the food that would be served in a given bowl, how it might echo the surface or contrast with the glaze. A tray became a frame. Each vessel had its own intrigue and character. Symmetry was avoided. There was a rhythm and tension chosen to create a space for a meal to exist. The plates allowed Mikio to compose the layers of moments that go into a meal, the layers of choices, and finally the layers of flavors which would all combine to create a nourishing experience of the season.

Omen is like that. One goes and has a beautiful meal, but it’s hard to pull apart all the effort, imagination and care of which it is composed. There are the dark walls, the paper lamps like rough moons, the music, the plates, the attention, the tastes and textures. All reflect a natural world of beauty. The choice of ingredients, the arrangement of food on a range of vessels–ceramic, glass, bamboo, lacquer or metal–and the service realize a dream. One of Mikio’s arts was to craft a stage for food and an opportunity for beauty reflected in the light of friendship and family.

Pots are formed from clay,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the pot.

–Lao Tse

When we were kids my older brother Shawn was the inventor and constant manipulator of rules. I remember at one point he declared the album Something Else!!!! by Ornette Coleman to be our new sneaker music. So every time we had new sneakers it went on the turntable. Then we would dance and squeak around the living room, improvising our moves to the music, showing off our new Keds to the beat.

As an adult I think of the times we delivered new bowls and plates to Omen. It was usually late at night after things had quieted down at the restaurant. Before we opened our boxes and showed off the new work I was often nervous. After we had spread out the pots and put something on a plate or imagined the use of a bowl we poured some tea in cups. The soft jazz tunes of Coltrane and Miles Davis playing in the background became my happy bowl soundtrack.

Biting into a persimmon
The great bell tolls
–Horyuji Temple

–Masaoka Shiki

I have boxes of my mother’s poetry archives. I dip into these pages every now and then and it feels like time travel. The writing is not always coherent or pretty, but it was a fire that kept her going. Sometimes I open a folder and find her words about experiences I had no idea she was pondering. These pages of poems set my mind ablaze. It’s a privilege to visit with my mother’s mind again.

There was a period of time before Mikio got sick when he liked to make Japanese breakfast for us. Sometimes we would meet him at the restaurant in Soho for breakfast. At other times he would visit us in Virginia and he would make breakfast laughing at our poor quality of mirin or enjoying the greens from our garden, adding umeboshi (pickled plums) from Kyushu. One time we met for breakfast in Kyoto at his mother’s house. He was jet-lagged arriving from New York and I was departing to head back to the states. He told me that when he was in Japan he would make breakfast and write a poem for the day. I began to send him bits of poems I was reading and enjoying that spoke of the day, the light, and the season. At some point he carefully thanked me for my missives but gently suggested that I write my own poems.

Sometimes I think poems are what help us deal with our regrets, for instance, that I did not send him my own poems or I did not appreciate my mother’s poems enough in her lifetime. At other times it feels like experience has been burned into my being. Writing is like gathering firewood, getting thoughts down keeps me warm like my bonfires. Forgetting is not an option for me, so I write my own truths using the currency of memory.

Life begins from now….
A new page…..!
Keep in touch.

–an email from Mikio, September 2021

The other night Peter Hoffman talked about his early experiences at Omen Azen. Peter, a former chef and restaurateur in New York [his memoir: What’s Good? was just published], described his response to the first time he ordered the house sake at Omen. First he recounted the easy possibility of ordering a glass of wine at a New York bar and being served a skimpy pour. So, he says, you look at the bartender and say, “really, that’s all?” So maybe you nudge them and ask, “please a little more?”

Thus, Peter was startled when ordering sake at Omen. What arrived at the table was a wooden box, often on a woodfired saucer with a high foot and deep sides [one of mine]. The waiter or perhaps Mikio himself would begin pouring into your box from a spouted ceramic serving bowl. They would pour, filling the box until it was overflowing into the saucer. Peter noted that this gesture of of abundance and kindness in New York City was so welcome, so surprising, so enjoyed that for him–and all of us–it became emblematic of the man behind the restaurant and his spirit of generosity.

Last night Warren and I ate our dinner at Omen. We ordered the house sake to experience Mikio’s kindness lurking in the shadows of the sanctuary he has created at Omen-Azen.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

–Naomi Shihab Nye from Kindness

Last night our friend, the fine art photographer Mitch Epstein, read a few words of his correspondence with Mikio over the last couple of years. The one that has stuck in my mind came after Mitch had sent Mikio a photo of a tree . “Thank you for a beautiful work given to me. The meaning of my name Mikio: miki means trunk, o is a man. A man of trunk, a man of tree, the image speaks a lot to me. Thank you, best, Mikio.”

Bill T Jones, the choreographer, said last night that Mikio always liked him to sing of spiritual things. So Bill sang to us in his deep, resonant voice, dressed handsomely in a big black hat and yellow scarf.

“I shall not,

I shall not be moved

I shall not be moved

 just like a tree

 planted by the water.”

In memory of Mikio Shinagawa and a great friendship. another expression of nothingness:

Tonight we were at Omen to express our love for Mikio as well as to celebrate the community he created–the 40th anniversary of Omen Azen in NYC. Patti Smith sang the following song for Mikio when she saw him on the street a few months ago. She sang it at the memorial tonight. She has usually sung it for Mikio on her birthday often celebrated at the restaurant. My transcription of tonight’s Wing:

I was a wing
in heaven Blue
out on the ocean
soared in the rain
and I was free
I needed no body
It was beautiful
It was beautiful
I was a vision
in another eye
and I saw nothing
nothing at all
and I was free
I needed no body
It was beautiful
It was beautiful
and if there’s one thing
could do for you
you’d be a wing in
Heaven blue
and if there’s one thing
would do for you
you’d be a wing
in Heaven blue.

–Patti Smith

Spending time with a newborn we have often spoken about circadian rhythms. We watch this small being wake, eat, poop, pee and sleep. He has not arrived with an apparent preprogrammed clock. Slowly he is more wakeful, more fussy at some moments, and settled and sleepy at others. As parents Zoë and Mike aim to find a delicate balance.

In my life in Virginia I have my habits, the times I sleep, wake, walk, eat, and work. My schedule relates to the landscape and to the season. Zoë has always told me one of the things she loved about the time change in the autumn was that we ate dinner earlier. Even when I am in the city I am drawn to get outside in the velvety shadowy dusk. I need to be free to slip between the awareness of daylight and the certainty of night.

It’s dusk, dearest. (In passing, isn’t ‘dusk’ a lovely word? I like it better than twilight. It sounds so velvety and shadowy and—and—dusky.) In daylight I belong to the world; in the night to sleep and eternity. But in the dusk I’m free from both and belong only to myself—and you.

–L.M. Montgomery, from Anne of Windy Poplars, Oxford City Press, 2012