Author: Azlan

560: “The Age of a Thing” (Daniel H. Wilson)

                “The age of a thing is in the feel of it. Secrets are locked in the fingerprints of cracked porcelain and the bloom of rust on metal. You’ve just got to pick up a dusty artifact in both hands and squeeze your eyelids shut. With a little thought, the mind-reeling eons of time will stretch out before you like a star-filled sky.” -Daniel H. Wilson, The Clockwork Dynasty, p1

                Here’s a game, or a practice. Or an artwork with you as one of the paints:
                1) Pick up something. Most recently reading Daniel Wilson, I’ve played this with an orange and a plastic fork in the airport.
                2) Hold it in both hands. 
                3) Think about what you know of this piece’s history. Of the movements and relationships and materials that brought it here. That many-crossed web that now includes you.
                4) Think also about what you don’t know. I can imagine an orange tree, imagine soil, try to shift my image from the idyllic scene my mind goes to first to the giant farming operation that surrounded this orange I’m holding. But I don’t know where the tree was. I don’t know who tended it. I don’t know the path it took to here.
                5) Return and remember that you’re holding the object in both hands. Perhaps you can smell it. Perhaps you shift your skin against its skin.
                Wilson’s paragraph reminds me why I love museums, paintings, sculptures. Depending on how you count, I haven’t gotten to hold very many artifacts. I don’t want to diminish how some specific objects are poignant with time and life. But I do start wondering, what does the artifact of this orange whisper? And this plastic mass produced fork? As Wilson describes so beautifully, with a little thought, time and space open for me in ways that make me reel—and rebalance.

by Azlan

559: “What was it…?” (Rita Dove)

“What was it
I wanted to tell you?
I forgot. That’s how
everything goes now,
all of the time.”
-Rita Dove, from “Apology, With Interruptions”

                I was having particular trouble with this post. Flipping back through the powerful poems in Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and the interlaced stories of Daniel H. Wilson’s The Clockwork Dynasty, trying to land on a passage. Then going outside to where the jays and a cardinal and another bird I don’t know are landed in a maple tree. Talking. The wind licked by. A rabbit stood still, watching me. I stood still, not watching it. Cloudy sunlight on my bare shoulders. Then I went back inside and listened to a moving truck beep beep beep at my neighbor’s. This morning I checked, and the arugula seeds are sprouting, tiny drops of green like ink dropped upward into air. The leaves opening for a drink of cloudy sunshine. 
                I don’t know what piece of all these intersecting moments and lives I wanted to point to. I don’t know what I wanted to point out. If point out it to bring out a small piece, a certain this, I guess I wanted to—to circle in? Weave in? Web in?
                I let myself forget. Maybe I haven’t yet seen what I’m listening to. Maybe I want to listen until the urge to point fades into winds, chirps, beeps, bare skin, maple branches.

by Azlan

558: “Objects in Constant Conversation” (Hattie Lee Mendoza)

                “Histories on many spectrums—ancestral, artistic, material, personal, and cultural—fuel my practice.
                My studio is a flux of mediums and objects in constant conversation with each other…”
                -Hattie Lee Mendoza (Cherokee), in her artist statement

                Today I got to attend a workshop with Hattie Lee Mendoza. (Here’s some of her art). I got to help carry in boxes of fabric scraps and beads, old bracelets and hole-punched playing cards and thread. Mendoza led us in laying them out, inviting, to cover three tables. She described sketching as a kind of layering things together, seeing how they fit, how the colors play and interplay. How they talk.
                My piece isn’t finished. Right now it’s wrapped up in my backpack, waiting for more stitches. Stitching makes me feel close to my mom, who taught me how to sew. To my aunt and my mom, who sat together laughing and hemming pants for my cousin’s wedding. To a family friend who calmly suggested I could keep sewing after I’d accidentally jabbed my finger. To my grandmother whose embroidery hangs in my mom’s kitchen. To an old roommate who loaned me embroidery thread to fix a hole in a pair of jeans, showing me how I could join the tear into a little scene mountains and rising sun. To another friend whose favorite coat we repaired together. Now the pocket doesn’t swallow their keys. To the friends I sat with at the workshop table today. 
                Mendoza suggested: start with the pieces you most want to include. The found objects and scraps, keys and buttons and shower tiles. See what goes with them. Following Mendoza’s teachings, sitting down became a kind of unfolding: like joining friends to take my unfinished cloth collage out of my backpack and listen as great grandma’s embroidery speaks to the playing cards and a twig from outside and the orange-silver pattern my friend is finding next to me. I’d like to finish this piece. And I’m glad the conversation goes on.

by Azlan

557: “Observe”/”Nothing To Say” (Jennifer Kronovet)

“A fire hydrant
in a cemetery—

observe. And then
nothing to say.”
                -Jennifer Kronovet, from “With The Boy, On A Walk,” The Wug Test, pg. 30

                Years ago a friend told me, “Some of my favorite poetry is the kind where someone says, ‘You hear this sound? I do, too.’” At the time I was confused. But now my beloved and I have rambling through our neighborhood, talking and quiet, motoring along and lounging. And so many of the delightful moments—and there are so many delightful moments—go something like:
                “You see that bird?”
                “Listen to that leaf rustling along the street.”
                “That green’s so green.”
                “Crocuses.”
                “A bunbun!”
                “Look at that tree waving.”
                “Want to walk a little more?”
                All these stitches into being here. And in being here, being. And in being, being together.

by Azlan

556: “Lookout For Enchanted Items” (Magic Puzzle Company)

                “Our yellow-suited hero has lost their friends in a vast enchanted maze. As you work your way through the rooms, look out for enchanted items that could help in your quest…”
                -“The Mystic Maze,” Magic Puzzle Company

                My partner and I are puzzlers. We like puzzles. We like the space above the pieces, shared and sweet as we look at the colors and the shapes. (That reminds me of Donald Hall’s “The Third Thing,” which made me think about looking at something together—side by side, not face to face—as a central practice for love). We like the colors and the shapes, the chatting and the time, the frustration—where does this piece go? If you figure it out tell me. We love the click of things settling into place. No surprise I suppose that I’ve posted about puzzles before. And this month the Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve just found add layers to all these things we love.
                The three Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve done lean into Where’s-Waldo-style image searches, themed characters, and small optical illusions when the sections of puzzle can separate and recombine. I won’t try to explain the mechanism more than that. Today I’m after something about the feel. A lot of my friends hate puzzles. I think I can understand (at least some of) the reasons why. Puzzles can feel like exhaustion, a grind, a trick someone’s not telling you— “I know how this goes together, but I’m going to make you shuffle around all these nick nacks before I tell you what’s already obvious.” And I see all that. There is so much, so much serious work to be done. Not against that, but alongside it, the Magic Puzzle Company highlights what else puzzles can be. An invitation to color and shape, story and character, world and time. A treasure hunt. A joke. A series of visual puns. An adventure someone’s inviting you toward. That’s true of puzzles, I think, and it’s also a reminder for how I approach other tasks.Take splitting firewood for winter: it can be exhausting, grueling, repetitive, endless. But it can also be something else. The axe swings. Lands. The wood shivers, or splits. A woodchip flies, and a robin does too, across the sky in front of me and up into the cedar. So much enchanted in this maze.

by Azlan

555: “What Do I Toss?” (Stephen Spotswood)

                “When I began the chore of writing all this down, I found I had to keep making the same big decision over and over again. What do I keep and what do I toss?” -Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favors the Dead, pg. 98

                It certainly does feel like a chore sometimes: sitting down to type something out, to untangle and re-tangle thoughts and images into memories and scenes, people and relationships. There is so very much to put together. Today’s applecore, waiting on the cutting board to be sliced for the compost pile. My partner talking on a zoom call. My friends, a state away, and our long phone call. The cat I’d never seen before watching me through a window. “What do I keep and what do I toss?”
                And it’s not a chore, too. Also. At the same time. A delightful both-and, with meanings branching to meanings, moments nestling into movements. Because in the apple core is the cold water as I washed the apple this morning, and the rock of the knife, cutting slices to share with my beloved, and the sweet kiss of all that sunshine gathered into apple. In my partner’s zoom call (half overheard) are ideas about representation and community and delight. That’s what she’s talking about, and we talked about that too. Including on a walk some weeks ago, the sunlight warm on my bare arms as winter lingers in the shade of the trees. My friends a state away, and also their last visit, and the next time I might visit them. I don’t keep things or toss things. Maybe that’s why it’s less of a chore. I write in circles to feel the all this inside all this, circling and inside, again and again. A cat watching me through the window. The next time I walk by it’s gone, but we’re woven together. In its fur I felt warmth, a stranger, and I also felt the warmth of a cat I knew when I was nine.

by Azlan

554: “The Bees Belong” (Ross Gay)

                “The worker unfolded the sign that said the bees belong here as much as we do, orienting it so pedestrians could read it…”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, pg. 211

                From some perspectives the yard outside my front door looks a mess. Last year’s dead stems akimbo, matted brown leaves, a few crocuses pushing up. I’ve been walking by and saying hello.
                A few weeks ago a neighbor and I chatted about solitary bees. When I think about bees I usually think about hives, about honey, but as far as I understand (to that burst of brown leaves and back, maybe) most of the bees from where I live are solitary. As far as I understand (a little less far, this time) most of these solitary bees live in the ground, but some of them will snuggle up in dead stems or hollow wood. Snuggle in for winter. Until it’s warm enough to wake up. Which is one of the many reasons (my neighbor said) they’re never in too much of a hurry to tidy anything. No good to be asleep and have someone come and stack you and your bedding in the waste pile. And how sickening to be the one doing the stacking?
                I’d heard about nesting solitary bees before, but since I chatted with my neighbor, I’ve been saying hello. And listening. I haven’t seen any of them yet, so this evening when I walked by I said how are you doing. I said I’m sleepy, too. I said spring’s coming but it’s still going to freeze tonight. And they were quiet, if they’re here. I spoke softly so as not to disturb them, and then went in to make dinner and crawl inside my blankets.

by Azlan

553: Satisfied Hunger (Ava Nathaniel Winter)

                “more alive / for having satisfied a hunger.” -Ava Nathaniel Winter, Transgenesis, pg. 7

                I often think about hunger as a destructive thing, a selfish thing. I have been taught to think that way. And, I realize, to hunger that way. Hungry to consume, to take, to take away from another. Ava Nathaniel Winter reminds me: aren’t there other hungers?
                And there are. So many. I’m grateful for the reminder. For instance: today as I walked with my friend we were hungry for the conversation, for sharing it, for walking together. We were hungry for intricate patterns of hands and knees and hips and swinging arms and glances, and hungry too for the rain that scattered over us. Rain that might (I think now, reading Winter) be generous in its loving hunger for grass, for ground, for trees and creatures walking through its laughter. 
                For instance: my partner is traveling, and I am hungry for the quiet of sharing space, for the stretch in an early spring evening when the sun has gone down and the rain has picked up and we are sitting for a long time before we look over and see each other. Share that: that loving glance. I’m hungry for it, and more alive for having satisfied the hunger.
                For instance: I am so often hungry to hear my friends’ voices.
                For instance: my partner and I first read this poem out loud, together, lounged on the same floor where we often lay side by side listening to the rain. We were hungry for the poems we read: for Ava Nathaniel Winter’s words, Ai Qing’s images, Fatima Asghar’s rhythms, and so many more. Poetry for me is sometimes a hungry thing: words hungry for sound, sounds hungry for sharing. Blooming, weaving hungers, tasting growing hungers, growing like grass does, and more alive for its embraces and satisfactions. 

by Azlan

552: “Where They’re At” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “Knowing who they’re with helps them know where they’re at and where they want to be.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, pg. 53

                In some ways it’s been a hard few months, and two weeks ago my partner commented: you’ve been going for walks with people less often. So I started reaching out. Inviting friends to the park. To the neighborhoods between our houses. Asking: when’s a good time?
                Earlier today I thought about those walks while walking back to my house from a chat with four other artists. We talked about our processes, what we were making. I got to see some of their pieces, including a sculpture like a three dimensional window peering into the sky, inviting me to lean forward, to breathe, to find that we’re breathing. Our conversation returned again and again to the compassion and joy of accountability. To the power of making as part of our relationships together, of how we’re responsible to each other, of what we share.
                Knowing who I’m with helps me know where we’re at and where we want to be. Art is one way to invite that knowing. These steps. And here I am, tired, getting ready for bed, alone at my kitchen table—and walking again beneath the sky that sculpture opened.

by Azlan

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan