in which I, having promised you boxes, just barely follow through
this summer at the studio where I was doing my residency Corley exclaimed that I had so many wooden boxes full of things; this summer that meant pochade box full of paints, structured leather satchel for the unfolding box of my view camera, battered box holding my still-broken folding Corona typewriter. How many more boxes I have now! I keep trying to clean the upstairs living room and mostly find I’m shifting piles of handmade boxes from one surface to another, avalanching them across the red couch, making unlikely towers as of misplaced shipping containers atop the cluttered surface of my desk. Last time I said there would be more books and boxes this time, that I would come with pictures of the things I’ve been making, and while that means the daunting task of clearing a space that makes my house look both styled and clean in which to take photos of the boxes I’ve been building, I do love a box, a neat place full of small compartments, a way of managing reliant mostly on having a home for each item in my possession. Today it’s snowing, I’m about to walk up to Ken Sanders where the books are on sale for CHEAP, and when I’m back I’ll sit down with my camera and figure out how to show you the things I’ve been making. For now:
song of the day: Nobody Knows Me At All by The Weepies
also New Girl by Fresh
color of the day: Pantone 14-4512 TCX (Porcelain Blue)
okay so I didn’t come right back, camera at the ready, instead spent an unknown quantity of my scant time poring over books, selecting the best of the Fortune Magazines from the 30s and 40s, filling a cardboard box that would nearly disintegrate in the snow on my way home, my arms so tired from cradling it, one hand-hold ripped through and the bottom going, that I could hardly lift them afterwards. So I didn’t take pictures of boxes or send this out to you through the snow, but look, now, it’s snowing again, like nothing ever happened, nothing even changed.
last week I was so depressed again I thought I would wind up in the hospital or dead, most likely, by the end of the week, even knowing that the unstable chemistry of my mind had been shunted into disorder by the absence of one of my medications and the regularly scheduled arrival of my period, before which every month I spend three days acutely suicidal and just waiting for the discomfort of intention to be replaced by the simpler discomfort of blood. Knowing where the thing comes from is not always enough. Even now, back on my meds, I’m having trouble getting things done, again, again, refrain of this broken cycle of my brain.
The heat is making a horrible humming sound that makes me want to turn it off but then I might freeze up here under the slanted ceiling of my bedroom where there is no heat but electric blanket (covered in cat faces: I was joking when I sent the link to my Mom but she sent it to me anyway), space heater.
Tonight I walked home from campus, after a class I am still not certain whether I will take (fierce competition for the final slot in my schedule). It snowed heavily the whole time we were in class and lightened just before we left, so that I kicked through fluff, photographed white limn of the trees; in the skeletal outstretched arms of one, all blanketed in frost, hung a number of white stars, glowing. The rechargeable handwarmer in my pocket was not charged, nobody answered their phone; still I was just joyful, walking alone. Any opportunity to be joyful, when I am still, in this season, bruised and pining, unable to have something that seems very clear to me, unable to forget it; unable too to picture what my life will be like when I have finished what I’m doing now, how I will survive, what life will be for me. How still, at that time, I may be wishing for something just beyond my reach, not in a way one can strive for but futile, fragile, so close the aroma of it is almost like tasting, but like a dream of tasting, a dream of a dream.
I want it to snow more. I want like the hymn snow on snow, snow on snow. I want it up to my second-story window, up to the eaves, I want to be warm, somehow, in my unheated bedroom, I want to retreat to the cave I’ve built beneath my lofted bed and feel the blue light of sun through crystal and cold. There are various people I would like to occupy the small space of the cave with me; none of them will.
Grace is in LA this week and it’s so close it kills me, not to have gotten in my car and driven to California. I am jealous lately of everyone’s best friend, I want mine with me. Both of our voicemail messages, I learned today, walking in the dark, cast back our childish voices, hers at least a decade old and mine older; I remember every joke I ever made into her voicemail, every gag message she ever recorded, every loose connection.
It’s just that if explained clearly enough things should become possible, the absolute truth of their rightness should transcend the limits of my words and be made clear, and would be, if I could speak rightly, which I can’t, so I stumble and satisfy and self-soothe, try not to yearn anymore, fail almost gladly.
I have never thought that I am long for this world and now I’m forced to live in it, reward of my own efforts, the terror of the oncoming, the predicted pattern of each monthly dip into depression, the clawing-out of that graveyard pit that puts dirt beneath my torn fingernails, the sink and slough and gradual rise. I’m not going to die, isn’t that terrifying to consider? I am going to die only after a long while, or in a moment I was not expecting; I am not going to be the grim angel of my own demise. This is what the boxes are for: the contain not just the books and baubles that I treasure but also to hold the fear and resolution, the sandy grains of my attachment to the earth.
I hate to have lied to you but I want to send this tonight and it’s dark already, what good will the images do you, dark smudges of box against the blue floor? Ok a pair for you then, and more to follow in some future missive, maybe next time, but I’ve learned my lesson, no promises. The others anyway are much engaged in gifts I haven’t yet given and I wouldn’t want to give their innovated forms away, my pride and joy of the past several weeks’ exploration.
boxes of the day: simple box with lid, box with divider and hinged lid
song of the day: Please Stay by Lucy Dacus
outfit change of the day: wear waterproof pants over leggings and carry a loose velvet dress; at school shed the snow-covered pants and shrug the wide shoulders of the dress over merino baselayer and suddenly one is dressed
drink of the day: London Fog (again, again)
recipe of the day: instant pot butternut squash soup from Kara’s leftover squash; add sriracha at the end
color of the day: Pantone 17-3612 TPG (Orchid Mist)
but two today, because the color of the evening is Pantone 13-4306 TCX (Ice Melt)
isn’t it odd, so raw at the edges, the way I peel and unravel? I am willing to be visible, if I must be at all, only precisely as I am, no artifice. As little artifice, that is, as is allowable, as my grim body will permit me to go out in, fierce censor of my emotional outfitting.
I’ve been doing a workshop through the Kolaj Institute and am overwhelmed to find myself among other artists of this underestimated form. In my research this week I discovered the work of Toshiko Okanoue. I love her odd, surreal collages, which she made when she was young, a student in fashion school, and began without having heard a word of the surrealists, the men whose work is supposed to anchor all of us in this assembled field. One hundred collages in a few years and then—marriage, divorce, children and ailing mother, slow passage of obscure years that burst, I’m sure, with the collage of frustrated ambition and hard days and beautiful, quiet mornings, before anyone else is awake, before even the sun, just its intimation, the suggestion of a day whose weight one doesn’t have to hold yet, before it has arrived. And now, 96, she is exhibiting, she put a monograph out almost a decade ago, and I am in love with her work, the spaces she creates, the windows through one world to another, the forms the bodies make on the page.
I have to be a collage if I am anything; the boxes are collage, pieces stuck together with PVA glue and methylcellulose; my whole house is a collage of the things I saw and wanted and got to make my mind feel calmer. Collage of all the selves I am trying to be: if collage then it is not volume filling up a fixed container, but a stack, a layering, an infinite rearrangement, a reshaping of space, a possibility. Collage is expansive, as I am, as I felt in the snowfall, my fingers and toes going numb, my boots blanketed white, the ecstatic space of the quiet snowy night.
If I make enough boxes will they hold the yearning, so that it will go away and I, quiet mind, will be alright? Or else will they somehow…make the thing I want come closer, finally slip into my fingers, sigh of soft relief? I want and want and want; I’ve told you before, let me not want but only make, craft, reimagine, repurpose, resurrect.
So strange little voice, to bed.
E
ps box-lovers and yearners of all stripes welcome, tell a friend
pps Do you like the snow? Do you have a box that I should make? What should I read to start this quiet new year? What is your favorite hour of the long night, best time to be alone?