Quick. Exchange. Recycle. Reuse.

I discover the "quick message" file on my cell phone and think it might make a good story if I rearrange the entries. What it makes is not "good" so much as funny.  And every sequence leads to the same spot--I think--a leap into bed. Really? Sexting, it turns out, is inevitable. So too is sorrow. Where there is a telephone, someone is waiting.  And nearly wordless. 

Exchange I (Recycle.)

 Where u at?

 B there soon.

Tipsy?

I'm gonna B late.

What's up?

Booty call.

U know u want me.

RU up 4 it?

Your place or mine?

Let's do it!

Exchange II  (Repeat.)

Do it! 
You up?

Your place?
Yours. Gonna be late.

Where are you?
Boy call.

Again?
B there soon.


 

Exchange III (Restraint.)

Soon
be there


Want
up

Call
do

You 
too

Late

Photos are of a plastic drop cloth hung out to dry. September, 2011, Halifax. Recycled plastic; reusable words. 

When Last I Died, An Interview with Sophie Calle

Let me be clear; it is she--Sophie Calle--who asks these questions.  I simply answer, as truthfully as I can. (I'm sorry if you don't believe me. You should.)

--When did you last die? 

--Late last night, three hours before the moon set. And then I woke again.

--What gets you out of bed in the morning?

--In this season? The thought of getting back into it at night. And sometimes the promise of a hot eucalyptus scented bath. Coffee keeps me up, as does the endless list of tasks life has handed me.  I cross one off, and it adds three. Or five, or ten. This is why I have to die every night; it is a way of resetting the clock.  But, alas, the list survives.

--What became of your childhood dreams? 

--They were all nightmares from which I am glad to have awakened.

--What sets you apart from everyone else? 

-- Nothing. I wear others' castoffs, and can hardly remember the last new pair of shoes.  In any case, I will surely fit into another pair someone else has tossed aside.

--What is missing from your life? 

--Nothing and then everything and then nothing again, so that I tumble into a quandry without top or bottom.

--Do you think that everyone can be an artist? 

 --Of course. Everyone but myself, naturally.  Which is why I must make such an effort to insist that I too might someday think of myself this way.  Just not yet.

--Where do you come from? 

--I grew up in a flat place south of this one, a thousand miles from the sea. The lights of the city blocked out the stars, and I thought that the endless roar of the traffic was the sound of the void.  

I was, perhaps, right about that.

--Do you find your lot an enviable one? 

--I have no truck with envy, though desire is everything.  Can you desire a lot? Yes, I do.

--What have you given up?

--Lent. Small purchases. And often, hope.

 --What do you do with your money? 

--I put it into a household account and there it disappears. I am not sad about this; what else should I do with my money? 

--What household task gives you the most trouble?

--I loathe vacuuming, spot removal, scrubbing the bathtub and fixing other people's computers.  And correcting grammar mistakes.  Yet I seem to be an expert in all of these things.

--What are your favourite pleasures? 

--You really think I'm going to tell you? Okay, I relent. One is....dancing. Nothing makes me happier. I wish I had been a choreographer. Or had known Pina Bausch.

--What would you like to receive for your birthday? 

--A complete set of poetry by CD Wright. And a really sturdy tripod. And perhaps a new pair of shoes all my own. Or a swimming pool; the sea is really too cold for sport these days.

--Cite three living artists whom you detest. 

--Artists? I can't think of one.  But politicians, managers, corporate kleptocrats? May an infinity of evil befall the lot of them, they who are the evil that shatters us. You want me to name them? Ayy, where do I begin? Just pick up the newspaper and check off the names on the front page.

--What do you stick up for? 

--Virtually everyone else.

--What are you capable of refusing? 

-- Butter. Sugar. Cream. A ride. I wish I were capable of refusing stupidity, but sometimes I tumble into it and cannot get out.

--What is the most fragile part of your body? 

--My feet. Or perhaps my breath. This is why I didn't become a dancer, although I still long for such precise athleticism. Words rarely fail me, but my body lumbers; it is less reliable than it used to be.

--What has love made you capable of doing? 

--Love has made me capable of hatred. Of rage, of going to battle.  Strange perhaps, because the opposite is not true--rage and hatred don't make you capable of love.

--What do other people reproach you for? 

--Unfinished projects. Belatedness. Abstraction. Absence.  Falling down when I should be standing up. Loving the wrong things. And they are right.  I reproach myself for these failings too, among many others.

--What does art do for you? 

--It is sometimes the only door to hope. Without it, I don't think much of human beings.

--Write your epitaph. 

--Wait, that's not a question. I would prefer not to. Not yet, though as I've said, I do sometimes die every night. See? Another unfinished project. A belated requiem.  Let us sing.

--In what form would you like to return?

--As a winged thing, fleet of foot; nimble, pirouetting, light of heart, ripe and tender like a peach in July.

The questions are French artist Sophie Calle's and have been taken from from “Sophie Calle: Interview.”  Frieze Magazine. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/sophie_calle/ 

Photo: Hotel bed, Philadelphia, PA. April 2011.

Shooting Ducks

As the year began, so it ends, in darkness.

Rain all day, and then wind and waves, pushing rinds of rotten ice into shore.  Out with the old....
In a day or two the sea will freeze over again.

The morning begins with gunshots--a hunter motors out beyond the skim of ice in an aluminum skiff.  He wears desert fatigues to stand over the sea and fire at ducks. Unlucky birds! Targets as soon as their plumage brightens for mating. They're no good for eating, these "fish ducks" as they're called; those feathers are destined to be trophies, stuffed and hung on the wall. A whole industry of memory, monuments to successful aim, sophisticated scopes, his practiced trigger finger.

I'm perhaps no different, hanging out the latest shutter trapped colours, little shreds of recollection:  one place and then another: I was here, hymning to the light.

Still, shooting done my way preserves the ducks, in light as in flight, for another day.

Frost Flowers on Glass

 

Overnight, frost sketches strange forms on the windowpanes--long dendritic tendrils, ferns, floral bursts.  These aren't technically "frost flowers"--those are three-dimensional ice sculptures that form over weeds or reeds at a lake's edge.  Still, these etchings do flower here in the sudden cold overnight, racing up the window, crowding out the view. Rare now, in this time of energy efficient triple glazed argon filled panes, they appear magical, otherworldly, effortless art.

We are staying in a winterized but not thoroughly insulated cottage near Lac Pierre, just outside of St. Alphonse de Rodriguez in Quebec.  It is warm--particularly near the wood stove--and we are cooking quite a lot, roasting game birds, making soup, roasting vegetables, so the air in the cottage is steamy.  Outside, on the day I took the photos, it was bitterly cold.  It is, at once, both the contact and the contrast between these two extremes--warm damp interior and cold dry exterior--that enable such frost patterns to grow up the insides of our windows. Warm damp air condenses on the interior of the window and freezes, forming frost crystals; each construction is, as the temperatures modulate, a sketch in progress. 

The photographs were taken from the inside, looking out at snow-covered cedars and the snowy yard.

On Not Reading

A couple of weeks ago I tried an experiment--not to read for a week.  I didn't think of this on my own; I was under the influence of some ideas popularized by Julia Cameron in her famous (or infamous, depending upon how you look at it) program, The Artist's Way.

At first the idea struck me--as it will no doubt strike you--as ludicrous.  Give up reading?! For a week?  During the teaching semester?! IMPOSSIBLE. But then I remembered that over the summer, while on the boat and in the throes of repairs, though I felt terribly guilty about it, I'd sometimes gone days without reading.  I knew I could do it, so I decided to try.  The week before the week I was going to give up reading, I read relentlessly.  There were classes to prepare, things to find out, a sort of bottomless well to fill up before I ceased moving my eyes across print. 

And then, suddenly, there I was, in my week.  I resisted the urge to look at the paper in the morning, to log online and cruise the pages of the internet.  I avoided facebook, long letters, magazines, and peering over the corners of others' desks at the publications scattered there.  And with each gesture of "resistance" to the thrall of print, I became more settled and more relieved.  I sat and just listened to what others were saying around, their stories and jokes and worries and tantrums.  Sometimes I laughed, as if to myself.

Peculiarly enough, the week that I was to give up reading, I was also to go to Ohio, to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday.  That meant that I would spend long hours in flight and transit lounges (there's a euphemism--uncomfortable places where loudspeakers exhort you, repeatedly, to watch your bags, report suspicious behaviour, step carefully onto the moving sidewalk and other inanities) without print to distract me.  What was I going to do? 

I walked.  I looked at things.  I spoke to people.  I listened to more conversations.  And I did, I'll confess, grade my papers (all of them!)--something I'd already decided wasn't quite reading, but more like accounting (ah the flexibilities of redefinition!) Once in the bosom of my family, I resisted the thousands of books stacked and shelved and lying about the house. I sat quietly, sometimes, or took photographs, or talked with my parents and siblings and their spouses and children.  And I learned a few things--

Among them, that reading is often, for me and others in my birth family, a compulsive act of abstraction, a determined flight from the discomforts and disagreements so close at hand between us.  I also realized that if I had a bar against reading, then I wasn't compelled to read whatever was set before me...the airline magazine say, or other books lying about, the "extra" and never finished supplements to my classes, or one research project or another....I permitted myself, thanks to the fact that I wasn't reading, to imagine or observe other things while I was waiting, or sitting for a moment, or eating breakfast or dinner alone.  (Imagine simply eating! No words!)

I found I was happier, more at ease; I didn't feel guilty all of the time.  I wasn't forever accompanied by that awful incompleteness that reading seems to deliver, the threat or the promise of the forever more, the feeling of being out of time, out of step with myself, forever behind.

I'm going to try this experiment again sometime--as soon as I can get through this stack of books and articles and magazines on and beside my desk, the bed, beside the bath, on my other desk, the floor....

On the Uses of Travel (or what I did with my summer break)

I am adrift, severed from the sense of time or season that geography lends a life.
Travel has scrambled me, undone my sense of sequence, jumbled spring summer autumn and winter. The calendar of days where I was seems strange now, the unspooling of hours where I am equally odd. I can’t seem to catch up to myself. Where am I, and what is real?

I have no idea.

I race from east coast winter to a season of wind, dry days and cool nights in Mexico. Autumn?—but the calendar reads April, May. Then I return home, briefly, and rush away again, west, to British Columbia.

Habituated to twilight foggy Junes in Nova Scotia, I am frazzled by the constant light. Cold enough for three wool blankets at night, but the portlights stream with sun after 4 am. 18 hours later, we tumble towards twilight. Summer light but not summer heat. When will that come?

Oddly, only north of 50 degrees latitude do we discover heat. And deep fjords winding between snow-covered mountains. There a glacier, and here, seawater warm enough to swim. A landscape of contrasts so large your eyes feel as if they must roll in different directions.

We turn south into cold, and then fly east towards lightening—a strike on the wing!—fog, heat, more darkness. The loon cries; the full yellow moon says fall is coming. So too the calendar (for once they are in accord!), and the sudden onset of school related work.

It’s glorious but confusing. I can’t keep up, my sleep seems forever in arrears.

Adrift, in debt, a little bit lost—that’s sailing isn’t it? We are deranged into change.

Real Estate Speculation

Real Estate Speculation

You never liked to be cold.

As soon as you died they came and took your things away.

(Yuppies’ trumpet).

Curtains beds sheets hassocks dressers rugs dresses shoes towels smocks scarves

--that infamous panama hat!—

boots umbrellas jackets your pea coat mules slippers and long lace up boots.

Estate sale.

They boxed your paintings—six donated to the local museum--then sold your horde of paint tubes and jugs on craigslist

rolls and cans of brushes bolts of raw canvas gessoed panels  stretchers frames frameboxes buckets of turpentine pencils and pastels rulers glass belayers pliers hammers saws nails shears

--everything but the chalkboard you used to plan (wipe errors easily away!)

Gestalts and spectral surfaces buried here

When the plants died—who came to water them? Your executors? She’s in Ontario, he’s in Calgary—they tipped them out at the edge of the drive then stacked the pots beneath the stairs. Lumps of dry earth and brittle leaves.

(Chester L Stump Crust has joined a men’s group.)

They can’t wait to sell the house.

Anyone can see what they missed—

Gestalts and spectral surfaces buried here--

Yuppies’ trumpet scribbled on the wall or

a mouldering rind of cheese in the fridge

a half empty jug of orange juice a frozen chicken an open tin of salmon-flavoured catfood--where is your kitty anyway?

and that crude icon painted by your friend Fred.  You bought it at the art fair just to encourage him—the title you figured worth $30

Chester L Stump Crust has joined a men’s group.

Silly junk of carmined wood stowed on the garage ledge with the spare key.

Your fingerprints span the doorframe trace rainbow patter on the thermostat dial.

You never liked to be cold.

These photos were taken at an estate sale property in Curteis Point, Vancouver Island, BC, June 2011.

The life of a painter imagined here is a fiction, and bears no relation to the life or works referenced in the photographs.