Rough Ideas

Every day as I start to write I hesitate for fear of saying the tone deaf thing. So I turn away from my pen and read what others have to say about the protests and the actions we can take or what Claudia Rankine wrote five years ago on the precariousness of being black in America. As an artist I am reminded that we can’t help but notice the personal lives and the heartfelt choices that have been made. I turn to weeding and drawing and processing clay as tangible acts that help me while I think. These thoughts create empathy for the crisis so many people are experiencing; thoughts that search for appropriate actions.

TODAY ANOTHER UNIVERSE

The arborist has determined:
senescence          beetles          canker
quickened by drought
                                          but in any case
not prunable       not treatable       not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.

The bark     cambium     pine-sap     cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns          the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,

this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

During Covid 19 and our sheltering at home I have harnessed my energy through routines. I have always had a love/hate relationship with schedules but I have kept just enough of one to know what day it is and to keep my memory grounded in daily efforts. Without the habit of a pandemic journal–which includes a quote, a list of activities, and four quick drawings–I would have lost track of the way the spring unfolded or how we leaned into the ritual of an evening dog walk without the dog.

HARNESS

Little soul,
you and I will become

the memory
of a memory of a memory.

A horse
released of the traces
forgets the weight of the wagon.

–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

The newspaper’s and journalist’s job is to bear witness to what is happening in the world. I try to take it all in and then digest. I read about the history of racism, the protests, and the way individuals are taking action. My medium is clay and paint and paper. These images are snapshots of how I put it together. I attempt understanding through the things I make and the ways they can be used. I am trembling, thinking, questioning, cooking, sitting at the table, talking and listening, and finally writing.

LET THEM NOT SAY

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned,

—Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

Most days I stretch and touch my toes. My friends I know from yoga may think this comes easily to me but I am not naturally flexible. I have practiced on being flexible since I was a teenager. I am working to stretch my understanding of racial inequality and how our nation has gotten to where we are. Every day I will stretch, read, make lists, take photographs, form pots, make drawings, take what other action I can as my way to greater flexibility and understanding.

PRACTICE

I touch my toes.

When I was a child,
this was difficult.
Now I touch my toes daily.

In 2012, in Sanford, Florida,
someone nearby was touching her toes before bed.

Three weeks ago,
in the Philippines or Myanmar, someone was stretching.

Tomorrow, someone elsewhere will bend
first to one side, then the other.

I also do ten push-ups, morning and evening.

Women’s push-ups,
from the knees.
They resemble certain forms of religious bowing.

In place of one, two, four, seven,
I count the names of incomprehension: Sanford, Ferguson,
Charleston,
Aleppo, Sarajevo, Nagasaki.

I never reach: Troy, Ur.

I have done this for years now.
Bystander. Listener. One of the lucky.
I do not seem to grow stronger.

—Jane Hirshfield, from Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

Lately I have found it hard to concentrate. What book should I choose to read? Do I skim or linger? How much of the newspaper can I survive?  How many minutes can I spend on social media? A colleague asked today when will Instagram go back to flower images? That question pushed me to ask what do flowers symbolize, say, or do? Could they be a weapon, a conversation, an answer, a question?  Could flowers be a moment of pause, clarity, or memory?

My Poems

my poems are fed up & getting violent.

i whisper to them tender tender bridge bridge but they say bitch ain’t no time, make me a weapon!

i hold a poem to a judge’s neck until he’s not a judge anymore.

i tuck a poem next to my dick, sneak it on the plane.

a poem goes off in the capitol, i raise a glass in unison.

i mail a poem to 3/4ths of the senate, they choke off the scent.

my mentor said once a poem can be whatever you want it to be.

so i bury the poem in the river & the body in the fire.

i poem a nazi i went to college with in the jaw until his face hangs a bone tambourine.

i poem ten police a day.

i poem the mayor with my bare hands.

i poem the hands off the men who did what they know they did.

i poem a racist woman into a whistle & feel only a little bad.

i poem the president on live TV, his head raised above my head, i say Baldwin said.

i call my loves & ask for their lists.

i poem them all. i poem them all with a grin, bitch.

poemed in the chair, handless, volts ready to run me, when they ask me what i regret

i poem multitudes multitudes multitudes.

Danez Smith (2019)

This time is black in so many ways. To find words to express the horror of police brutality is impossible this morning. I took time to read and question if I should post something. I write with respect for so many lives. I want to call up the warriors of compassion to speak for the pain so many are experiencing. I went to the garden to weed , breath and figure out how to move forward. I remembered the poem A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay. Somehow poetry can make it easier to breathe. Poetry can tell a truth.

A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

–Ross Gay, copyright © 2015.

This morning I went to the studio crying after reading the Washington Post. I was grief stricken over racial injustice, death, and uncertainty.  All I could do was to paint things black. I put a coat of black paint on a sheet of paper, a coat of graphite on a gessoed panel, and a coat of black over North Carolina red clay. It was as if all my brush could paint was a spell against hatred, racism, and anger. My hand moved in sadness and respect. Words feel useless and yet to say nothing is untenable.

SPELL TO BE SAID AGAINST HATRED

Until each breath refuses they, those, them.
Until the Dramatis Personae of the book’s first page says, “Each one is you.”
Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another.
Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly: I.
Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless table.
Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves bending.
Until fear bows to its object as a bird’s shadow bows to its bird.
Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles.
Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat.
Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral.
Until what feels no one’s weighing is no longer weightless.
Until what feels no one’s earning is no longer taken.
Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing know themselves mirrors.
Until by we we mean I, them you the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger.
Until by I we mean as a dog barks, sounding and vanishing and sounding and vanishing completely.
Until by until we mean I, we, you, them, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger, the lonely barking of the dog before it is answered.

—Jane Hirshfield in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

Last year before I left for Australia I bought a new sketchbook-journal and collaged in a few maps. As I flew higher and higher across the United States and the Pacific Ocean I wanted to be able to visualize where I was going and what I was doing and where I had come from. Maps have always been a language that I have been fascinated by and when I fly I can begin to imagine how they are made. When I think of early travelers and the maps they made it was a special skill of visualization of place and placement. I remember when I was in my thirties and navigating the intimate humid world of parenting I clung to maps as a symbol of my feeling lost. I collaged my drawings on the edges of continents and I loved the bits of ocean in different shades of blue symbolic of my being at sea in my new role as mother. In the pages of maps I found comfort when my days lacked direction.  My friends began to save atlases for me and even as I have grown out of my sense of being lost or rather grown into my sense of place I have volumes of maps. These days I like the pages of indexes as backgrounds for drawings or painted pages. I like the regular patterns of names and numbers and alphabetized lists.

In the front pages of the journal from 2019 are bits of maps cut from a 1960’s atlas. There is the yellow outline of heart shaped Tasmania. There is a series viewing the hemispheres. Then I have a larger map from the 1940’s of Australia with the topography color coded to show altitude. These maps I hoped would be part of my attitude that the journey was the destination. The maps hold reminisces and anticipation of meeting and making—walking and talking—cooking food and digesting found ceramic materials; how we each make things and perceive the world around us.

I looked at my trip as an adventure to meet new people and make new friends. I wasn’t sure what I would get out of it in terms of my physical work. Before many trips this is what Warren often asks. “What will you get out of this and why are you going?” I always say, “I m not sure and if I knew I would not have to go.” When I look back at my book recording my travels I see that the pages are like mirrors and portals into five weeks on the other side of the world. It’s really hard in the moment of travel to know what to write, what to draw, and what to capture. Overall, one needs to figure out how to navigate. I always think that an experience is going to be obvious. It will somehow be symmetrical like the visualization of the hemisphere, but I forget about the irregularity of geology and the shapes of mountains and the paths of waterways. I forget the times one can’t sleep or one’s stomach is upset or when I am irritated by sand in my shoes.

Mapmakers had the power of naming places. And I am always impressed by Ben’s love of giving things names. Our time together last year was called Fire on the Ridge 2019. When there are visiting artists he calls it SWIPE (Slow Working Institute for Pragmatic Expressionism) and the pottery is named Ridgeline. In a way it’s branding, a term I normally hate because it makes these personal experiences feel like commercial enterprises. But in this case naming the experience gives it a different kind of power and structure.

The maps in the front of my journal are a way of visualizing three-dimensional space. By gluing them on the page I hoped it would give my travels a framework. In the book is a record of the time spent in an airplane and in a studio, homes, beaches, trails and putting wood in a kiln. But really what I am after is describing the quality of time. The morning loop walks, the talk during our the mid-morning coffee on the deck in the sun, the shared admiration for the way grub trails in a gum tree look like drawings, or loose bark strips can look like a strip tease. And in the end there is the coming home. There is the desire to feel whole in a place where I understand the inner workings. Intersections of map lines and constellations connect to this place that I call home, a place full of love. During this time of sheltering at home and letting go of plans and travels I have been grateful for my home. I may miss flying higher and higher and seeing new places, but I am reminded of my goal from when my daughter was a baby and small walks were huge triumphs. These little tiny adventures are where I learn to see with new eyes.