egg carton

Dear Imaginative,

Pretend you have an egg carton and you want to put just one really good thing into each little cup.  What goes in? 

a heart shaped rock

a little ball of pink yarn

a piece of chocolate

a recipe, folded up

a leaf

a beaded ring

a pop top

a twist of seeds

a marble

a white owl's feather

a shell

& one 

more 

thing.

OAD & longing longer.

 

Dear Friends,

I have a serious case of Object Attachment Disorder.  Take, for example, this Walter Foster book on how to draw with pastels.  Really, do take it!  I put in a box that I left at the Goodwill, so you can find it there easily.  It looks like an ordinary, harmless, slightly lame, instructional drawing book.

Let me tell you what it really is:  it's a fetishization of pale green wool carpet, romantic love, and velvety softness.  It holds two, maybe even three generations of longing in it.  It's cliché to the max, and I finally set it loose.  No, no; congratulations aren't necessary.  This is about a grieving confession of short-sightedness.  No, it was more willful than that.  Complications?  You betcha!  These great barges of emotion don't float down river easily; you really have to inventory it all to launch these behemoths.  

My Grandmother gave it to me, and like everyone's grandmother, she represented a sophistication that I was encouraged to strive for; she was genteel, I suppose, and from a time period, status, and income level that I did not know, so of course it seemed desirable.  So it wasn't just instructions for drawing, it was instructions for a lot of things, including manners and relationship, and morals, oh!  So many twisted morals!  Still, what it came down to, was the cover.  I loved the cover of this book like crazy.  It was big, like, 18 inches by 12.  It had the same vase of flowers (my Grandmother said: vaahs) on the front and the back, except the back did not have the title.  This was magic to me, this flattened and bizarre three dimensionality.  

I almost just tore the covers off, and pasted them up in my laundry room, next to some other odd private and suspect bits of identity-  prints of Frida Kahlo paintings, a photo of a Spirit Bear, a playing card with a bullfighter on it, an old postcard of a Montana highway.  A sort of vision board of guilty image pleasures.

But see, I don't want to stay in this place of longing any longer, so I say, Take it All Away.

Chance Encounters with Fragile Materials

Dear Would-Be Gallery-Goers,


      I have made these objects, dear viewers, primarily out of leftovers, scraps, and found materials.  My mind as I am making these objects is open- I try to let the materials tell me what they would like to be paired with, or attached to.  It is a kind of visual listening.  I am thinking of how lovely these little bits are in their own right: this short stubby worn stick, this little bit of watercolor sea, this calligraphic rusted and run over wire, and how perfect this little square of dark linen is with the small pink oil paint stain on it.  I would like these to feel like they grew, or accumulated, more than they were pushed or crafted into existence.

     Transitory and temporary materials are used in building these objects: branches, powdered graphite, wool batting, string.  Many of the works will change over time:  tape will unloose, grasses will shatter, threads will break.  Some pieces may go to ground entirely over the years.
    
     These funny little objects seem right to me now, during this time.  They feel like the imperfect offering in Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem.”  I hope you will find poetry and love in them.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
-Leonard Cohen

No Answer.

Dear Choiristers,

We should sing this this one too, together. 

I was going to call you this morning, to tell you about a dream, and to ask you what the thing was without its story.  Was it then ready to receive a new story?  Did I make the page white and receptive again?  Or was I just adding mystery?  Another possibility:  Was losing the story making it less, was it taking away power? 

It just goes away, the story, when the people who tell it are separated by time, space, memory or death from the object.  The story stops, and the object goes on.  I have an object, an orange-red thing we bought from the neighbor when he got a divorce, and held a series of garage sales to help finance his struggle to keep making the payments on his ten acre spread. 

It hulls corn, for seed, once the ear has dried.  I don't even know that it has been used, and if it has been, by whom and when?  How many times and what did they do with the seed?  Did they plant it?  Or grind it up for pone or corn bread?  Perhaps it was a demonstration model that a saleswoman would bring round to show to potential corn cob de-kernalizers?  A further story, beyond where we got it, and how it came to the neighbor, might be what we have done with it for the three or four years of our stewardship.  It could be ended, all this wild surmising, by tossing it into the recycling bin, where it would go into town on a truck, and be sorted by the hands that sift our garbage into piles of possible grist for new materials.  I doubt very much that it would be reborn as another cast iron corn sheller.  I expect it would maybe become a bit of a steel girder for a dreadful new parking structure on a quiet, low 'underutilized' corner of your town.

But, you say to me, it's only because you watched La Dolce Vita that you feel this way- and I say to you "watched" is not even the word.  That movie puts you through it like Moby Dick takes you whaling on a ship captained by a madman and crewed by hopeless and hapless people like us, who see the edge approaching but keep on scurrying towards it.  No, 'watching' is not the word, and yet, I did not feel like the girl waving, or the man receding, or even the brutalized and dead fish, the object of curiosity.  The object.  I watched it all with a terrible knowing;  I have seen this before and often.

Everyone keeps on saying these things, saying 'look out,' and 'take care,' and 'beware.'  These are the stories, but what will the object be?

An object is what, exactly?  Take a manuscript-  what is that, exactly?  It's the first, the original, but what does that mean in the Robot Overlord Digital Age?  Everyone has a copy, right here on the gorgeously flat, story-filled and completely objectless, democratizing Internet.







PS
If you got this far, reading all the way to the bottom of the glass, wondering where we might be going, you'll want to hear this again.