Category: quiet now

could my tears tell me anything about philosophy?

This week’s Bewilderment is a reprint of an essay that first appeared on April 12, 2023, in the ‘First Person Singular’ vertical at Memoirland. Thanks to Sari Botton for publishing this there, and to Liz Iverson who alerted me to the opportunity.

“Crying: a dissertation” is the only part of my doctoral work I’ve ever tried to publish; in fact, it’s not exactly my doctoral work, anymore; when I decided to send it out, I completely revised this passage as an exercise in (1) letting go of some of my doubts and anxieties around the dissertation, (2) figuring out how to write a very straightforward personal essay that stayed true to my own experience of complexity and even contradiction, and (3) trying to communicate some of the scholarly ideas in my PhD work—that are also central to my teaching and life—in a way that felt conversational but not reductive. So here you have it, along with a few images of the desks where I wrote that PhD and one of the day I handed the pre-viva draft in. Thanks for reading.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a crier: I don’t cry at movies; I’m often dry-eyed at funerals, despite a soft heart. But between 2007 and 2012 I spent more time crying than at any other time in my life. Was it a coincidence that during that time I was working on my doctoral dissertation? 

My dissertation was in part about feeling and scholarship. Could one be a scholar and feel things? Everyone around me said no, and so I went through years of research and writing roping off the part of me that, over those years, cried in bathrooms and public parks, libraries, grocery stores, bedrooms (mine and not mine), classrooms, university corridors. I felt crying was essentially shameful: the thing I did when language and logic failed me. My tears seemed like a sign that I was unsuitable for serious scholarship. But that isn’t quite right. In my experience, crying was not divorced from knowing; it was simply farther out, past the language I had at the time. I knew; I just couldn’t talk about it yet. 

The history of tears is a hidden history. Its geography is the margins: back rooms, alleyways, under the table, in the corner. The philosophy of tears is erasure, impropriety, unnaturalness, witchiness, irrationality. Tears are too much, like anger is, in some bodies. And bodies are at the center of this, because it’s a body that produces tears. They come from glands above the eye, leak through our tear ducts and down the sides of our noses. If a person is dehydrated, their glands will not produce enough water to moisten the surface of the eye, which will become irritated. And they will not be able to cry. What I’m trying to say is, there’s no way to think about tears without thinking about other things that bodies do, like eat and drink, or like die, fuck, laugh. 

My tears seemed like a sign that I was unsuitable for serious scholarship. But that isn’t quite right. In my experience, crying was not divorced from knowing; it was simply farther out, past the language I had at the time. I knew; I just couldn’t talk about it yet. 

There’s a long tradition of thinking about intellectuals as somehow disembodied, ideal minds that can have ideas about things without being affected by those ideas, or without their ideas affecting the things they think about. Of course, no such person exists: it’s just that certain kinds of people—well, white, educated, cisgender, straight, relatively wealthy, generally Christian men, to put a point on it—get to walk into literature and history and philosophy as if they are that ideal mind. This isn’t about laying individual blame; it’s that if everyone around you speaks like you, you probably won’t notice that you have an accent, but you’ll be able to hear the accents of anyone whose ways of speaking are inflected by some difference in place or family or language. You get the picture. If the model for being a serious thinker is someone who never cries, well, what happens to the person for whom tears are always close to the surface? 

About halfway into my PhD, I happened across a book called Pictures and Tears, by an art historian named James Elkins. My method of finding new things to read was not a very scholarly one: I would walk through the library’s stacks, dim towers of books on either side of me, and, according to a rule I had instituted, pull off the shelf any book that caught my eye, no matter how unrelated to my thesis. At this point, I hadn’t read anything about crying. I hadn’t thought about it as a subject, something to look at and form questions about, despite writing about feeling.

I took Pictures and Tears home from the library with me, the green cover snug in my bag between notebooks. In the book, James Elkins asks how and why some people cry in front of paintings, and goes on to wonder about why these responses aren’t really part of the scholarly field of art history. To cry in front of a painting is a private kind of scholarship, one that the necessary repetition of the scientific method cannot reach. But for Elkins, this doesn’t mean that tears have nothing to offer. It means, instead, that the frame we put around meaning might need to change. As I sat with the book under a quilt my friend had made for me, I realized that instead of having to separate tears and (“real”) knowledge, maybe crying in front of paintings could tell me about relationships between kinds of knowing. But I had never cried in front of a painting, and I doubted that I could. 

On May 14th, 2010, at about six o’clock in the evening, I was in Paris—a few days away from my desk and the library and PhD-student-life in England. The Louvre was free that night, and a friend wanted to go, so I did. I was in no particular state of heightened anticipation. If anything, I was prepared to be a little bored, because I like smaller museums better than huge, encyclopedic ones. I did have one reason to go, though: I wanted to see a new painting by Cy Twombly that I heard had been installed. At this point, I can’t even recall how I knew that it existed. This preamble matters, because though I’m not usually a blasé person, I was that night. I need you to know that I didn’t have a feeling of special excitement about the visit. I didn’t really give it much by way of forethought, in fact.

There’s a long tradition of thinking about intellectuals as somehow disembodied, ideal minds that can have ideas about things without being affected by those ideas, or without their ideas affecting the things they think about. Of course, no such person exists…

We walked through sections of European paintings from the Renaissance (obligatory stop by the Mona Lisa and a quick pass through the Botticellis) and then, following small plaques on the wall, made our way through rooms of Roman metalwork. The floors were cool, pale marble. The woodwork was dark. In the rooms, the cases of gold and lead objects glowed. I walked into an antechamber containing two such cases and stood facing the room I’d come from to look at them. They were small and dark and the room, despite being lit with museum lights and the light from the window, felt relatively dark, too. Then I turned to walk into the next room. 

Elkins lays out what he imagines to be the ideal conditions under which one might cry while looking at a painting: go alone, avoid trying to see everything, take your time, avoid others’ interpretations. By being with the painting on one’s own (and its own) terms, by ignoring others’ readings of it, and by spending time alone with it, it might be possible to cry in front of—or because of—it. On that evening in Paris I wasn’t alone, but Elkins’ other conditions held. When I turned from the darkness of the antechamber and its small wood-framed cases, there, right in front of me, opening into a brightness that felt larger than the actual dimensions of the room, was Cy Twombly’s The Ceiling.

In factual terms, this painting, The Ceiling, can be measured and its details can be noted and filed away in the correct art-historical filing cabinet (waiting to be called up in newspaper articles or research or gallery didactics). It is 3,750 square feet in size. It was painted in 2010. It is inscribed with the names of Greek sculptors. Its colors are pale brown-gray, gold, blue, white. The blue field that dominates The Ceiling is meant to call up the water of the Aegean Sea. Those details don’t satisfy me, though, in terms of what I experienced that evening. The words, the art historical facts, aren’t enough to convey the massiveness of this painting, and its massiveness is part of its meaning. The Ceiling is more, does more, than I can capture in this dispassionate catalogue of color and dimension. What can I say? I burst into tears in the doorway to a world where everything was suddenly blue and white and gold.

I realized that instead of having to separate tears and (“real”) knowledge, maybe crying in front of paintings could tell me about relationships between kinds of knowing. But I had never cried in front of a painting, and I doubted that I could. 

When I returned from Paris to the English city where I was studying, many things were unchanged. I still associated tears with acute embarrassment and worried that they made me seem, to others, like an incapable thinker. The process of writing and reading was still difficult, sometimes deeply painful, threaded with self-doubt. The “dry-eyed” theoretical works I was learning to read, and that I had real affection for, were still there. But I brought back with me the equal reality of my spontaneous tears in response to Twombly’s blue-white-gold immensity. In that moment, in an immediate and irrefutable way, I learned an also about knowledge that has stayed with me ever since. There is no either-or when it comes to thinking: the same selves who do the work of theory are the ones who grieve a death, or thrill to new attraction; whose hands get pruney in the dishwater and who need to eat and drink. 

I don’t know why I cried in front of this painting and not in front of any other, even paintings I love, or others of Cy Twombly’s works, ones I’ve admired. What comes to mind when I look back is simply the size of the painting: how large it was, how high up it was, and how it filled the whole room visually. It seemed to fill the room, and me, in such a way as to welcome me—all of me. Looking at The Ceiling in tears meant looking at it in the first person. It was I, only I, who stood there crying. My tears were my signature, my way of taking on tradition from the place only I could have: I the scholar, finally in the same exact place as the I who could not control her tears.

August is here; September is coming. Next month I’m planning to write, loosely, in the region of learning to write and teaching writing. If you’re reading this and there was a moment you can remember where a teacher changed your mind/your life/your practice about/of poetry or writing, or a reading you remember that broke your mind open in important ways, would you be willing to tell me in the comments?

Thanks again for reading. See you next week.

which, it turns out, are not *for* anything but themselves

To hold the act of thinking before it resolves into thought. To write plans in, write grocery lists in, count chores off in, diagram ideas in until the ideas finally take shape. To be a physical location for so much that would be hard to hold in mind alone. To remind my hand how to move. To make the act of beginning to write an everyday thing, done without ceremony or anxiety. To convince me that writing is ongoing, as thinking is, without end, without scarcity, and without a target in mind. To practice in. To merge the acts of “write” and “draw”. To keep my brain lively while I wait. A place to make my whole life, and then, more or less, to leave behind.

An example of a frequent exercise, twenty minutes of noticing exactly what’s around me in a limited area, usually about a square yard. I adapted this from a thick description exercise I learned from a sociology textbook, and over time it became a repetitive training in attention. Slow down.

Vertical shape or horizontal shape, the page lends itself to different kinds of movement with the hand, which in turn render ways and kinds of thinking that are not at all the equivalent of the thinking I do in the orderly left-to-right, top-down of the computer screen.

For a long time I used only red hardbound notebooks of that famous brand, with or without lines. Less superstitious now, I use basically any kind of notebook, but I do go through periods of one kind or another.

When I had easy access to a drill I made the notebooks above, half of a US letter-sized sheet (cut the long way), about fifty or seventy half-sheets in total. Cardboard from mailing envelopes (chipboard, not corrugated) and heavy, waxed binding thread (the link is to a shop I’ve ordered supplies from before—good quality). I used this way of binding; here is a print tutorial if you prefer. Once you have made a few books you start to realize what you want from them and you can make your own adjustments. For me this meant tripling or quadrupling the thread for a stronger binding, adjusting the depth of the stitches, and scoring or creasing the cover with my bone folder so it would open flat.

The long and wide form changes the way sentences can be shaped. When I am writing by hand, the material insists back at me. It makes me do things (like break a line, but not only) and it does things to me (like suggest relations across space and time). Of course, a computer screen is insisting, too; that shows up in how the shape of the A4/letter page is taken for granted by so many writers and thinkers. It’s just that, reading and working so much in that form, I often forget that it is not default at all but a design choice that I, too, can choose (or not).

There is no perfect system; the imperfectability of it is the system. That’s life. You go on through it, trying to make sense of what’s in front of you, and trying to connect that to some other things. So here you see notes from a conversation or lecture about poetry (someone telling me about Joan Retallack) and me working out an argument with myself about my own tendency toward skepticism when faced with something that challenges me (“Some things are just HARD”) and a recording of a conversation in a café (I assume: “Two egg mayonnaise [sandwiches]” “Do those have cress on them” “—no” “Oh, could I have cress, mate. Thanks”). A question to myself about household finances: “Buy weekly ticket? £36.75”—this tells me I must have been teaching in Leicester at this point, and taking the train there to do some printing as well; for several years I was a member of a community printshop, which I loved. Scraps of paper tucked between the pages, just as they were when I opened this at random. And underneath, a lesson plan. Some people have notebooks for one project at a time but I have always ended up putting everything together in one place, like, well, my life.

At the start of the covid-19 pandemic I was able to borrow a small etching press and I used some of my time making prints. I made some reduction linocuts and I also made prints by inking up plants I found on my walks and running them through the press. This page is me making notes about that process as well as about that time—back when so much was unknown: “Let us try to use this time well—be generous”. And there are some notes in Italian that I have no memory of writing. Looking at this page, I can remember both how free and spacious the days felt and how full of worry they were: for my students, who were often lonely and afraid, some of whom had no money; for ourselves, as we, too were lonely and sometimes afraid; for the future, which seemed more intensely unknown than it had a few months before. I also see this page with the eyes that time gives: I can see interest in the drawing I made over a rollout of ink on the bottom left. I see thinking I’m doing now about education and artmaking and community also present in my notes. I’m reassured: thinking and being is like water underground, there even when you can’t see it. Just keep making marks on the pages. Meaning will take care of itself over time.

I have always drawn while in class, and this one—a philosophy class I audited a few years back—was no exception. No reason that thinking has to take the form of verbal language. And memory too. The drawings bring me directly back to the formica tables in that classroom, and so much I learned there.

As a teacher, I have to remember that learning is not shaped like “objectives” and trajectories. It goes in all kinds of ways I can’t predict, and looks like things including the opposite of my intentions. My drawings must have irritated some of my teachers. I know they irritated my favorite high school teacher, a Christian Brother I revered, who taught religious history, ethics, and theology, and who slapped a book on my desk once and told me to pay attention. But drawing is often how I pay attention. Making notes does not need to be orderly or direct.

When reading was hard and writing felt impossible over the past few years, I began to make books like this one for myself: a cover containing four folded sheets. Sixteen pages. I made the covers out of Rives BFK 230 gram and the inners out of printer paper. Sometimes I would buy nicer inner paper. They are a little smaller than half a US-letter-sized sheet, a really enjoyable format. And such a small book feels like no pressure at all. This notebook records part of a long drive across the US in summer 2022. The language comes directly from signs I would have seen (with the exception, perhaps, of the phrases at top right). As elsewhere, this is me practicing seeing and recording.

Will I go back to these drawings and notes, “make something of them”? On the one hand, no; they are already the “something” they are. I feel obstinately that the purpose of the notebook is itself. It is not there to serve the “real” work of a book or painting; it is there as itself and for itself. On the other hand, to open an old notebook reimmerses me in the time and place of its making. Sometimes I am reminded of things I would rather not be—of my own past pettiness or smallness of imagination, narrowness, unformednes, and that helps me think again about how I want to be, what matters, how to make art and write, how to teach. Sometimes I am given images or words. Sometimes the notebook teaches me about the work I’m making, not least that I’ve been making it for a long time (so keep on!).

The notebook holds and teaches, keeps me patient, lets me be as large as I am in aspiration and imagination; it lets me bound all over, be profligate. A free place. It was never for the now that I have ended up in, but the making of the notebook is what brought me here, all the same.

Thank you for reading. See you in a week.

the world is the thing that makes the poem

(If anyone reading this is in Dublin this week: I will be taking part in the really exciting Tsundoku Artists’ Books Fair at the Printworks at Dublin Castle. It runs Thursday 13 through Sunday 16 July, 10-5, and there is a great program of events as well—many of which are free.)

A while back I wrote about what I’ve been thinking of as public speech—the speech that transforms privatized places into public ones, or reminds us that our public spaces are truly ours. (That essay is here.) I habitually collect examples of this kind of speech as I walk through towns, cities, even rural places. Everywhere that people are, I find us marking the walls, streets, windows, even trees, rocks, sand with what we long to or need to say.

As I walk I also watch out for another kind of ‘public speech’: uses of language that are surprising, that force me to see words and grammar and idiom and cliché in new ways, adding to the fractal or prismatic way that language works. This is fundamental to the making of poems in my experience, the ability to hold multiple facets of meaning in view. Play is invention, not sticking to the rules or habits just because they’re there. And invention leads me to more possibilities for meaning. I like the way much of this kind of publicly presented language says yes in advance to what (else) might be possible in language.

Reading text that appears in public with one eye closed or against the grain of the normal, I am offered new readings and new possibilities for all my writing. “But it doesn’t mean that!”, my most literal interlocutor may cry. Meaning isn’t something that’s just there, though—is it? I think meaning is the something that arises from the way the things that words are interact with one another. Not the imported assumptions that sometimes stick themselves between the reader and the page (or the person and the world), but the friction of the letters arranged into words, words next to other words, punctuation marks, and the deep, moving grammar of both sentence and world. Words are things. Letters are things. Language is material, has being. It’s not a scrim behind which the idea moves, as if idea is the real thing and language its ventriloquist’s doll.

It is a special thrill to find language that is poetry (in this case, part of Louis MacNeice’s poem “Snow,” one of my favorites in the world, on a sign pole in central Dublin) taken from its context and thrown against the world like this. I love that some people will walk past without seeing it; some people may read it and have it enter their bloodstream totally decontextualized (no knowledge of the poem) only to encounter the poem later in life or not at all; some people will know it. It is like a subtle hat-tip to find something like this. Hello. We are here.

This one is simply beautiful to look at (the red/red, the neon tubing), and so clearly shows me that Word = Thing. I love the apostrophe there. What belongs to the KEBAB? You, probably. Me. All of us. All of us already in the thrall of the word.

And this one. The longer I’ve written the more I have said to myself, what happens it I don’t see through a corrective lens—one that wants to adhere to some standard I imagine or have learned—but instead try to see what is? What happens if I take the world at face value, the text in front of me as complete, the person in front of me as real and whole just as they are? What if I refuse to gloss over ‘error’ with the corrective fluid of assuming I know where we’re going? Pleas pull. Well. That’s actually kind of what they do.

Lots of stickers around that have far-right, fascist, or advertising language on them. I like to type on stickers and paste them over any far-right QR codes I can’t scrape off. I like to change the face of the world a little: remove those fascist and anti-immigrant stickers with my fingernails. Put some other language in their place. And anyone can do this. (I’ve been doing it since high school, when my alter-ego, and early email address, was Sticker Avenger.) In some places through the city I see stickers that other people have written on or had printed, with hopeful or anxious phrases on them. As the seasons pass some parts fall away, and the language is transformed. I love this. The place for the poem is everywhere, and the language of the poem is all of our language—its many kinds, including the most ordinary and the most fragmented—and the poem belongs to all of us, and the where of it is the world.

Thanks for reading.

they make summer better

Praise the screen window, through which rain comes while sleepers sleep; praise the dampening sill and the breath breathed out like breath through the light curtain; praise the smell of the rain rising from wet street through warm wet air into sleepers’ dreams, and the sleepers now talking or turning in their sleep.

Praise the window: praise screen and hook and latch, praise the way in spring on first warm days the stile will not ride the jamb at first, but sticks, until, with a leap, it opens and the air comes in, with scents of melt and mud. Praise the smell of the screen, metal and sour, the tang slipping up your nose as you press your face against it, in memory or in childhood. Praise the way the screen holds indentations like minds hold faces there. That’s where the dog ran through the screen, or remember when you fell asleep in your open window, refusing to be put in bed? Praise these metal screens themselves, against which mosquitos whine and junebugs bonk. Praise fly prevention and the exchange of air. Praise precise feet of katydid bright-greenly going one by one up the ladder of the screen.

Praise the screen window. Praise it even in winter, filled with frost the first thaw won’t remove. Praise the ice-flowers on it and the rain that catches in each angled cell. Praise the smell of bonfires through it on the last October day you’ll throw the sash, and praise the night in August when, waking halfway through, you know the season’s changed because the room is cold.

Praise the screen window—praise the air that moves from neighbors’ rooms across the side yard into to ours. Praise the smell of cooking, praise the variousness of smells. Praise asafoetida and cumin, chili, oregano, garlic, onions, butter; praise meat-scent flowing past the houses of vegetarians and the smell of beans making its way through the houses of the rich. Praise the sound of someone else’s children; praise the ordinary fight. Praise the way the open window lets us hear a call for help. Praise music; praise piano, drum, and bass; praise even scales repeated without end. Praise someone else’s lovemaking on a morning we slept in.

Praise the screen window; praise the clean air of morning and the worn-out air of afternoon, praise the sunlight, praise the cold. Praise windows open on December mornings to clear the foggy shower out; praise open windows and their holy screens every day of June. Praise the hygienic fact of sunlight—a praise that’s sure there’s nothing there to hide. Praise the anyway: the open window and the fact of sun. Praise all the season’s dust that sits inside the lock.

Praise the screen window, praise the city entering our cells, praise the point at which our space becomes, without our saying so, out there. Praise passersby, and bass from idling cars, and clapping rhymes, and even spit. Praise the sense that we belong to everyone, the refusal to reserve our us for us. Praise the entering in of every other being’s breath to ours. Praise passing cars, passing annoyance, and the passing rain, which, falling now again, will drawn us to the sill. Praise what’s in us that’s most like a child: most curious, unguarded, willing to be surprised, most open to the world of this is what there is: and we are here.

I hope that, if it’s summer where you are, you have the pleasure of screen windows. (I don’t know why, but everywhere I’ve lived in Europe the houses/apartments have not had screens. It’s one thing that would massively improve my quality of life here in Ireland: no moths! No mosquitoes! In the non-renting future, if there is such a time for me, there will be screen windows.)

In other news, last summer I spent June 20th with Nina MacLaughlin, Linda Penfield Danilek, Kasey Jueds, and Margaret Funkhouser making graphic scores (mine is below) for the solstice. Two musicians joined us that evening and played the scores. We were lucky that they also recorded their improvisations and made an album, which is out on Bandcamp this week. There’ll be a listening party on Wednesday (June 21) at 9 p.m. Irish time/4 p.m. US Eastern. You’re welcome to join!

Thank you for reading. See you in a week!

blooms where you’re planted

I will take roses however they come: hybrid tea roses on big-thorned stems in shockingly bright orange and yellow; old roses pale pink almost green; wild roses bright fuchsia and making a toothy hedge no one but the rabbits, squirrels, and birds can get through. I’ll take proliferating multiflora roses in New England’s abandoned lots and dog roses in hedgerows here in Ireland. I’ll take roses with a view of strip mall. I like roses leaning through someone else’s fence, or spilling over a wall. I have never really had roses of my own—they need land and a long time spent in one place and I have had neither—and so I follow others’ roses at the distance of the tenant or the visitor.

In the absence of my own garden, I also watch for hydrangeas blooming near a parking garage. I take note of the purslane coming through cracks in the sidewalk, and the American yellowrocket appearing like fireworks along the highway. Feeling myself out of place in the New England landscape, I come to like the way that purple lupines spread throughout Maine, where they, too, “should not be”—they are so part of the landscape that without them it would feel bereft. I like that lupines and other escapees give lie to the neatness of plants belonging or not belonging somewhere.

I like bright pink petunias that drop their seed from the windowboxes of the small-town bank and beget volunteer offspring in the gutter, year after year. I like the orchid growing among the high grass in loess hills. I like the linden trees planted decades ago along public rights-of-way for foot traffic, making late May or June a perfumer’s delight to all passersby for about a week. I like moss on stone walls in humid climates and cherry trees in full bloom in grocery-store parking lots. I like the right of gentle trespass when I cross a vacant lot to look more closely at a flower, and I want it to be available to everyone equally.

But above all I like roses. They are finicky, disease-prone. Probably better fantasy plants and visited-through-the-fence plants than actual garden plants in terms of time commitment. I’m sure they make demands on their keepers; grown for mass distribution, they are managed with pesticides and herbicides that are toxic and persistent (florist education may include how to protect oneself from exposure to pesticides/fungicides from cut roses and other flowers). Rose forums are full of posts about mildew and black spot and aphids and other diseases and pests. Roses make their keepers sick, metaphorically, with worry, and physically via exposure to the toxins that make their industrial production possible.

(Last weekend, after having drafted this, I read Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, which is everything I enjoy in a biography—and it’s more than a biography. It’s a beautiful book and very worth reading, whether at a bookshop or a library. Many of the things I say here are also present in Solnit’s book! While it is nominally a biography of George Orwell, it’s also a meditation on being human, on time, on politics and being a political actor, on writing, on the ways our actions have consequences we can’t imagine in advance, and on active optimism—and on roses. Solnit actually goes into depth on the rose industry, so if you haven’t read about it before and are interested, she will take you there. As you might expect from Solnit, Orwell’s Roses refuses the anesthetic of easy beauty in favor of a dose of attention to complexity—to difficulty and deep pleasure. I don’t always love her writing, but when she’s on, I do. And she is on in this book.)

Roses are a mark of placedness. Long-term commitment and, in the age of almost no winter and of hybrid plants, continual blooms to repay all those years of pruning. I see older women in their gardens here in Dublin pruning hybrid teas into neat vertical structures that keep away some of the mildew and aphids, open the plants to light and air. Their big flowers are peach-orange, yellow with pink edges, neon pink, pale purple.

It’s the old roses (also called garden roses) I really love. Especially the pink-peach ones and those greeny-gray-pink ones. The scented ones that are plush and cup-shaped and full of petals. So plush.

They are difficult to capture. Even in old fruit-and-flowers paintings, where they are beautiful, there is something stiff about them—stiffer than life. A rose is a living thing. Maybe it’s just that they are still once they are caught.

At the end of teaching I set out to make a dress that feels like roses. Ballerina-dress of my childhood imaginings, full, soft, many-layered. In the absence of a piece of land where for decades I can tend to roses, I got my hands on a piece of cloth, cut it, sewed it, have worn it many days already. Part of the ongoing project of learning to bloom, more or less, where I’m planted. Until I have roses where I’m planted.

but all around us are precious living thinking beings

This semester, I had the uncanny experience of listening to a student give a presentation that had been generated by a large language model. (The contribution of the LLM was not acknowledged by the presenter. It was made clear by the kinds of factual and conceptual errors in the presentation.) In the assignment brief, I had asked each student to choose a book of poems, talk about the poet and their work in general, then read a poem closely to teach us some new element of poetry-making, and finally to design a writing exercise that the class could do in order to internalize an element found in/through that poet’s work. Please enjoy this, I said as I went over the assignment. Treat it as something that can teach you how to broaden your own writing. Focus on what moves you—you will do best by allowing yourself to find pleasure even in what’s unfamiliar.

Writers know that words matter. Words make things happen in us and to us. They make things possible, imaginable, and real. They do things to us. They are material objects in a world where we, too, have material being. It isn’t magic, the way words act on us, and doing things with words isn’t magic either. Both are the result of the lifelong, sustained attention that happens in our everyday encounters with language. And really it isn’t the end point of those encounters (the moment where words do things) that matters the most. After all, we talk and write and think and sing and promise and so on over and over through our lives. Using language, we don’t arrive at some point where what we mean is what we Mean, all by itself; instead, we keep on unfolding the what-is-this-doing-to-me and what-do-I-meanness of language in relation to all the past unfolding of it. And that’s how the words we use do things to us: not by jumping out from behind a lamppost, fully formed and perfectly expressive, but by, one after another and one next to the other, constructing the very things it’s possible for us to think.

In the writing classroom in the past few years I have noticed the urgency with which some of the beginning writers I work with want to “be a writer”. Maybe it’s more like “Be A Writer”. “Being A Writer” means to have arrived: to be Someone: to have people pay attention to you: to be affirmed. It’s seemed to me very linked to the way that social media presents page after page of completed objects (craft projects, books, babies, houses, lives). Process is invisible; product is immediate and enchanting. Like like like like like. There is no shortcut, I have to say, gently (to myself, too). And there may never be success, affirmation, attention except from the peers with whom you cultivate long and meaningful relationships, the people who will, like you, say this matters about the confounding, slow, sometimes sad, sometimes tiresome, sometimes exhilarating process of finding out how to do things with words and how words do things with you. The people around you, this place here—the page, the classroom—this is it. We are here. You want to be a writer? Be with us, writing, here.

I think that especially in writing classrooms—and in all kinds of contexts where we are talking about how ideas happen, what kinds of people get to make art, how it is that art gets made, and how long it takes to think and make things well—it matters what kind of language we use to talk about the world around us. It matters that we think about what we mean when we say “thinking” and “creative” and “innovative” and “important” and “freeing”. It matters that we think about what we mean when we say “alive” and when we say “person”. It matters in part because words like that direct our attention.

Really what I’m thinking about here isn’t the student who chose not to do an assignment, or to do it poorly; we all have priorities. My mind has returned over and over since the presentation to the question of why they would use a large language model, instead of just not preparing and half-assing it on the day, or faking it some other way, or even coming to talk to me about why they didn’t want to do it—an option I made available. Why a large language model?

I think it is in part because of the way that in the writing classroom, in the world of social media, and in the imagination of student writers, writing can come to seem like a zero-sum game: the more I’m a writer, the less you can be. The more I’m a prize-winning poet, the less you are. The more I’m published, the less you’ll be. The more favor I curry, the less there is for you. This sense that there just isn’t enough to go around, and that there is a single and identifiable end point to aim for (and beat others to) deadens invention, subordinating the messiness of finding out to familiar routes toward a recognizable object that repeats the features of what we already know as “poem” or “novel” or whatever. It makes it seem like there is some thing out there that “writer” or “writing” is, and we are racing for it.

The choice to use a large language model to make work must also be to do with how LLMs are talked about right now, too: “intelligent” and “efficient” and “magical” and “low friction” and “resource-light”. I borrowed login credentials for a popular version and input various parts of the brief, but what came out was not “intelligent” or “efficient” or “magical” or “low friction” or “resource-light”. It was generic and factually incorrect and dull. And it didn’t even have the benefit of the dullest parts of my own writing, which is that I have done them and by the end, ideas have begun to arrive. Furthermore, it was not ‘low friction’; the companies that built it exploited workers in Kenya to filter vile content out. And it was not ‘resource-light’; it cost a liter of fresh water for me to ask it pretty frivolous questions (in the scheme of things), and it took almost 700,000 liters of fresh water to train the large language model. There are places in the U.S. (where I’m from) that have not had reliable clean water for years. Millions of actual, living intelligences (human and not) deprived of that necessary element. This is not a neutral thing, to use fresh water for something other than life.

“It matters what we call a thing.” When we use the word ‘intelligence’ for a program that runs statistics, more or less, to come up with combinations of words that occur predictably in such-and-such a genre of text, we allow ourselves to forget that intelligence is a composite of error after error; we forget that error comes from the Latin verb for ‘to stray’ and does not mean bad but wandering. When we use the word ‘creativity’ to mean the instant production of something that has the appearance of a work of art, we efface the fact that creation is a process, one that is responsive to material and to our own associative, sensitive brain-bodies, that reveals itself as we engage in it. We lose out on the learned-by-doing knowledge that, among other things, shows us thinking takes time.

After all, it isn’t just the getting-there that teaches us, or that’s valuable. Writing with our hands matters. Knowing through our bodies matters. Knowing material matters. Knowing via the human processes of making matters, not least because metaphors take their sense from our encounters with real materials and relationships. Time spent using our bodies matters in ways that are rhizomatic and may show up in ways we can’t predict at all. To use the shortcut of a large language model may cause us to miss something fundamental—including that thought is an embodied and emplaced process, not distinct from the outcomes of thought. A carpenter knows how to make a staircase in part through the embodied knowledge of the depth and height of stairs all their life.

The way LLMs and other “time-saving” devices/scams (social media, all kinds of multi-level marketing programs) are presented makes it seem like the end is the point. Produce more. Win more. Make content and get some consumers. Who cares how; it’s the result that counts. Get more done, faster. Get through the “parts that don’t matter” and get on to the good stuff. Better yet, get someone else to do the parts that don’t matter for you. Cheap, easy, quick, and just as good as a human could do, or good enough because no one’s really reading, right? It’s so deeply cynical and so sad to me. I can’t quite tease out the relation among these things but it seems rooted at once in intense anxiety and competitiveness (both often fueled by an approach to teaching or talking about writing that focuses on ‘success’ in worldly terms—publication, recognition—that relies on scarcity) and in a slick, scammy understanding of the (literary) world wherein everyone around one is a mark.

But in any case, the way large language models are talked about in traditional media and on social media sure might make it seem like you could skip to the end of a ‘creative writing education’ and get right to Being A Writer without anyone being the wiser; certainly without hurting anyone. What’s more, you could especially skip the things you’re not used to, the things that seem like they’d bore you or ‘be pointless’, and you’d still have the result, which is (the semblance of) Being A Writer. But the “parts that don’t matter” are the good stuff. They’re all there is. The whole thing—the whole life thing—is finding out that something you thought might bore you didn’t, or finding a way to turn a constraint into an engine, or figuring out that you can do a thing that seemed impossible at first. Over and over. Writing is not only the arrival at meaning but the struggle through meaning toward meaning to understand at some point what one thinks. And then again.

When Hayao Miyazaki says, in response to a team of developers who have shown him an “AI”-generated moving image of a distorted body moving as if in pain, “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is. […] I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself”, I think he is responding to exactly the skipping-forward approach that LLM technologies permit. Skip forward over discomfort, unknowing, error; skip forward over encounter with (in Miyazaki’s example) the deep, real, embodied experience of one’s dearest people living with pain. Skip forward over grief—and also love, like Miyazaki’s love for his friend that allows him to notice his pain. Skip forward over the time it takes to think, which lets us think about where we are, and what it means to be there, and who else is with us, and what ‘with us’ means….

To skip forward this way is an insult to life because life is not an arrival at some peak or other. Life is the ongoing, unfolding, responsive act of being one among other finite beings, knowing they are infinitely precious because absolutely finite. And art? Art is the process of taking that knowledge of finitude, which sharpens and becomes more complex all our lives, and trying to make sense of it both alone and with others. The computer that the developers mention near the end of the clip, that could draw pictures as well as a human could—that probably exists now. But to think that technical skill is what makes art “art” or plenitude of ideas is what makes writing “writing” neglects the heart of these meaning-making pursuits: it is not the picture that results that is the thing called “drawing”. Drawing is the lifelongly act of learning to see and to connect the eye and hand. The end is not the point. It’s the long middle that matters.

Thanks for reading.

billionaires simply could never

We all know these mall-food-court-bench type places that the billionaire enclosers of the internet have bought and sold us on are not really our common places. We know we need shared, truly public spaces to have ideas no billionaire could ever dream of, because such spaces are worth our lives—and our lives are worth much more than the paltry billions of dollars those restless hoarders dream. We know that the commons we need we make together (every one of us) and that that commons puts to shame the stories about competition and merit, in the light of the truth of the dignity of all our shared lives (humans, animals, plants, water, land, air). But in the meantime, we bend the billionaires’ unpublic spaces to make a shape we can live with.

There is a crisis in Ireland: far too many wealthy people and corporations owning property, far too little available for ordinary people to live in. Far too many landlords and aspirational landlords. This is not only a problem here, but here I am. (To give some numbers: there are 26 houses in the entire county I live in that are for sale for less than €225,000. One house I looked at, listed at €285,000, sold for €410,000. Average rent in Dublin County is €1900+/month. Average salary in Dublin is €32,000±/year. When we were looking for a place to rent, we sent out about 175 queries and received five invitations to tour a property. At each tour, there were multiple prospective tenants. At a bus stop recently, a woman with a baby started up a conversation with me and disclosed that between her and her partner they could barely pay rent and would be leaving their current apartment at the end of the month. But to where? They could not find anything they could afford within an hour’s commute of their jobs.)

How do you make art in places where you can’t even live? How do social movements form when you have to work overtime to pay rent? How do you care for others? How do you keep your health?

How do you meet friends, in your new city, if you have to work as many shifts as you can just to pay your landlord? How can you build something, how can you root, if the only future you can see is emigration or sharing a dorm-style room for half of your paycheck every month? Where is there to say this stuff? How do you find your people? (And how can it be that there are houses selling for millions and millions of euro just a half mile from where people are literally sleeping in tents?)

Some public speech feels urgent now: speech that reminds us these are our places. The streets are ours. We pay for them. Many of us built them, many of us maintain them. We do not have to wait to speak to one another—not for a boss to give us a break, or a gallery to offer us a show, or a publisher to accept a book. We do not have to wait. We can say, as these marks do, I’m here, you’re here. We are here. This is wrong, this is right, this is what we need, this is what we dream.

We need each other. We help each other. Get a piece of paper. Write on it in big letters the thing you want to say. Put it in your window. Get a piece of cloth. Embroider what you hold dear there. Go to the copy shop and enlarge your poem-drawing-thought bubble; print a dozen copies. Make some wheatpaste. Find some walls, maybe those plywood walls put around demolition sites, where in a year some shoddy expensive condos will go up. Look. Look. Look. Look. With our own hands (shaking as they may be), with the lines our hands make, with the words of our minds and the company of others: we can remind ourselves what is common to us all. Make it, in a transient way, paper way, a fragile and tenuous way, a flickering way ours. They may have the billions, but we have the dreams.

Thanks for being here and for reading.

what do I reverence?

Two weeks ago I wrote about Dürer’s drawing/watercolor called The Great Piece of Turf . This is an image I love for how it reminds me that patient, careful observation and description will render evocative, resonant results (including the ‘result’ of a thoughtful life, made of the materials of living). I’m returning to it today to think about what it offers me as a writer—but (and) also as a human, being in the world with others and my own mind. There’s an exercise at the end. Both the essay and the exercise below are adapted and revised from a talk given as part of the Little Grassy Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University in 2022. You’ll need about thirty minutes for the exercise, if you choose to do it.

The Great Piece of Turf pushes me toward the world. It insists on the importance of sustained and slow attention to ordinary things that are immediately to hand, and it does this in a medium—watercolor—that takes time and yields a unique object. In some ways this seems to be unlike my everyday life, insofar as my everyday life appears to be made of repetitions: the same walks, the same chores, the ongoing relations with the people around me. In fact, though, the medium in which Dürer renders these ordinary plants reminds me that the dailyness of the life I live, sometimes without looking at it, is in fact the only thing. It is the basis of artmaking. That ordinariness and repetitiveness is what life is.

In my own life, I know that much conspires to turn my gaze inward, or awayward, into rumination or avoidance. I am often tired, as you may also be. I am living through a pandemic and the accelerating death-drive of the past fifteen years. The world is full of grief. The deaths of species, irrevocable changes to ecosystems, murder in slow motion and fast motion committed by the state, depersoning: all of these are painful, grievous. Avoidance is easy in the short term, and there is a lot out there that makes it easier. Some people can make a lot of money from my avoidance of pain, and those people have created many on-ramps to avoidance. The on-ramps are easy to access and addictive.

It takes discipline to turn back to the world and be with it patiently, as it is. I have to do it again and again, reminding myself as I do, in the doing, that there is nothing more important than this, nothing better than this I could be doing. It helps to have accompaniment in that. In The Great Piece of Turf I see the result of an artist’s sustained looking at the most insignificant beings in his environment, and I am reminded to do the same. Go. Look. Look at what’s at your feet or at your fingertips.

Many of the beings in Dürer’s drawing are known to me: I can identify them by their names. Their names may be so familiar that they may seem almost not to be a kind of meaning: or at least not the kind of meaning that the heavy head of the melancholic angel is. They do not point toward something hidden—accessed through whatever locked gate and with whatever obscure key. They point to themselves, each other, and us. They say, we are here. And you are, too.

Knowing my weeds is about knowing the ground I stand on even as it shifts: discerning first principles, finding form and sensing what it can do to me, practicing careful attention to what is rather than what I would prefer or project there to be, being grounded in the places where I live. Knowing my weeds is also a commitment to going out—away from the screen—to encounter that world-as-it-is. This kind of knowing is the opposite of the avoidance of pain. It sometimes brings me into contact with cutting losses. But those losses would be there in any case. I want to be alive to them, and to the beauty and ordinariness of my life, and these lives.

Dürer’s weeds—the time they represent (they must have taken so many hours of looking) as well as the living weeds his drawn ones index—offer me a chance to rotate my perspective as well as to rotate the object of my perception. They give me questions rather than pronouncements, and teach me to ask how I know what I know. Often the answer is, I know what I know by hours of looking at and being-with others. So I had better do that with discernment. I had better learn to see my seeing, even of the most everyday things. Especially of those—because the root, in my experience, of being able to dispense with something (of being able not to mourn its loss) is to stop seeing it as what is in fact is: a complex phenomenon, always already involved in my life. Nothing is beneath notice. Everything touches.

In this transient world, the practice of attending to what is might be a way to spend one’s entire life. (Isn’t that science, music, art, poetry, philosophy?) Sustained, patient, careful attention reveals the complexity of the world—a complexity that is always further unfolding. Dürer’s image of weeds reminds me that what is most ordinary is worth caring about. In fact, the reverence for ordinary life ends up meaning a reverence for all the things I encounter in those repetitive motions of walk, work, housekeeping, (broad) family life. This echoes out into how I use my time, how I (try to) conduct myself with other people, how I act in public and private, how I think about commerce and garbage and use and ownership.

Dürer’s image also reminds me that whatever I reverence will show up in my work. My ideas, beliefs, values show up in my work and through my perceptions (the how and the what). This means that I don’t need to worry about the ‘artful’ subject: I don’t need to try to find something that is worth making art “about”. I don’t need to shift away from the ‘minor’ to find the ‘major’. I need—and this is the hardest work in part because it doesn’t announce itself as important (and much in my world conspires to paint it as unimportant)—to pay attention to what is here, with me, now, to try to see it through my hands, eyes, brain, body. I need to do this, and I need to repeat it over and over, for my whole life.

In his attention to what is small, ordinary, common, and easily passed by, Dürer shows me the value he must have assigned to exactly such ordinary things as weeds and grasses. That he took care to render them with skill and imagination shows me that these plants taught him how to see them; this in turn shows me his willingness to be humble, to be close to the ground, and to learn from beings who were, in the cosmology of his time and place, certainly less than human beings. His care with these everyday plants shows me how the subject of artmaking is always already at hand, and reminds us that our attention to exactly what is at hand—be that an array of plants or the text of a Supreme Court decision—will remind us that here, yes, even here is the place to stop, look, and discern what it is that we are perceiving. We do not have to go far away for meaning. We can look at the world for a long time and try to understand what we are perceiving. We can make art—or lives—from that.

The following is an exercise. You’ll need about thirty minutes for it. In the end, the guidelines are less important than what you do with it; you can’t do it wrong.

This is an exercise in sustained attention to some value you hold dear and simultaneous sustained attention to a very ordinary, probably not very lofty, fellow being. It is the aim of this exercise to cause an interlapping between the way you feel when you think about an important value and the fact/process of looking at a very familiar plant.

Set a timer for about eight minutes and make a list. Try to be as clear and precise as you can, and once you have your list of values or virtues—this is the hard part—try to discern the difference between what you actually value, in action, and what you aspire to value. When you come across some aspirational values, put those in a separate list. You can revisit them in the future.

Choose one value or virtue that is particularly important to you and note that.

Then, with your virtue/value in mind, take your phone and go outside (you may want to use an app like iNaturalist to identify plants). Set a timer for ten minutes and get close to the ground. Don’t worry if this feels a bit silly. No one will care, no one is looking. Walk around if you can. You need to find those tiniest plants. The weeds and wildflowers. Things that you might pass right by, even on foot. Look in the cracks, near walls, between the curb and the grass…. Take photographs of each plant. When the timer rings, return to where you can write.

Set a timer for ten minutes. Choose one or two specimens you photographed and identify them by name(s). Beginning with any names you know the plant by, address it; for example, [Plant], I reverence you. I offer you my [value]. Give the plant(s) your observational care. Describe component parts, their relations, their shapes, their colors. Note size, leaf and flower forms. Identify the place where the plant was found and the time of day. At each moment of observation, offer the plant reverence and rededicate your virtue to it. Allow yourself to pay attention to the plant in as many ways as possible, connecting the positive virtue or value you identified with the act of looking at the plant. Continue without stopping, repeating phrases as desired, until the time has ended.

Thank you for reading—thank you for being—here.

look at the nearbyest thing, and look at it again and again

In 1503 a man in Nuremburg, Germany, made a watercolor of a patch of dirt and the ordinary plants growing there. This is The Great Piece of Turf and he was Albrecht Dürer, and the plants are still legible: great plantain, and dandelion, and burnet, and germander speedwell, and yarrow, and smooth meadow-grass, among others. Those plants can be found right there in the front yard or on the strip of median on a busy road. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, you’re probably within a dozen yards of one of them now.

I can’t remember when I first came across this image of weeds and dirt. It was probably around the same time as I was introduced to Dürer’s more famous engraving called Melencolia I, so somewhere between 2004 and 2006. I’m going to loop away from the weeds and the soil in the image above for a while, and I’ll come back to them at the end. But in order to think about The Great Piece of Turf, I find I have to think about this other image, too. And part of what I want to think about is the difference between how Melencolia I was made, and how The Great Piece of Turf was, which will take a little time. So onwards with this looping-out, and eventually we will loop back.

This engraving, in which a more-or-less human being (with wings and a wreath-crown and a grumpy? pensive? expression) is surrounded by a cherub, a sheep, tools, and objects of mysterious meaning and importance, is maybe better known than The Great Piece of Turf. The content of the image suggests its seriousness and importance. Knowledge and power, death and birth, religion and science. It’s allusive, referential. It’s coded—it lends itself to being read as a cipher—and it includes actual codes. Everything about the visual content of this image tells a story of in-group knowledge, exclusivity, control.

Engraving is skilled work. (The Met Museum has a great explanation, with brief video and lots of images, of how engraving works.) In Dürer’s time, it’s one of the ways images are disseminated widely: you can pull hundreds of prints using one plate. This is a revolutionary change in artmaking and also in communication in Europe, and it happens over the same period that books and education and literacy begin to change. Engravings travel. They are inherently multiple; the only ‘original’, the only thing the master-artist’s (or engraver’s, if a technician makes the plate from or after an existing drawing or painting) hand touches, is the copper plate. Made to move, and made to be seen in many situations, the engraving (the print in general) does not have the unique status of the painting.

This is something I love about prints—they refuse association with The Master (even if made by one, the hand that drew touched plate, not paper; often, prints were made by workers in studios rather than The Artist themself). Prints refuse singularity. They double and triple themselves and won’t play the game of pretending to be rare when they—when images, in fact—are not rare but shared, a human thing to make.

An economic consequence of the way prints are made is that they are generally less expensive than other kinds of art objects. I say generally, because I’m sure you could exceptions, but really I mean pretty uniformly. There are more prints than there are unique art objects like paintings; supply up, demand down, prices down. Even without money changing hands, the simple tendency of prints to proliferate (visit any printmaker’s studio to find out what I mean) means they don’t feel as precious. I can have one and you can, too.

Dürer made Melencolia I in a medium that allowed for mass reproduction, at a time when the mass reproduction of images and their distribution was still relatively new in Europe. This image could travel. It brought its strangeness and mystery with it into every room it entered. Its symbols were distributed, no longer closed away in only a few rooms. And now it is here, in your phone or on your laptop, between your hands. Mystery, strangeness—qualities of precious things. But the printed image brings these things out of solitude and offers them to many viewers. They are no longer reserved but shared.

Now I can begin to loop back again, to that watercolor painting of weeds and grasses. Those common plants we hold in common, painted about five hundred years ago and still conserved with care in the cool rooms of a museum.

I like to look at Melencolia I next to the watercolor picture of weeds and grasses. I like the difference between the moody, poetic, cryptic, occult subject of the engraving and the open, direct, immediate, familiar subject of the watercolor, and I like this especially because the difference in subject echoes a difference in medium, and a tension between image subject and the meaning in the media. Subject of Melencolia I: esoteric, lofty, coded. Medium: available, dispersed, mobile, multiple. Subject of The Great Piece of Turf: ordinary, familiar, proliferant. Medium: technically difficult, produces a unique work.

Both images are meaningful to me. Both are masterworks. Both are important in the history of European art. But there is a difference in what these two images do to me as a viewer: When I look at the watercolor of plants and ground, I don’t feel as if I’m looking through the picture toward “real” meaning, a hidden meaning that comes through symbolic or narrative meanings imbuing certain kinds of dress, certain objects. I feel like I’m looking at some plants, in part because I often do look at plants like these. I feel like I’m being asked to realize that I have seen these plants, and to realize that these plants are something that can be looked at.

In our time, we see images of all kinds reproduced and changed and moved and reproduced again. But this watercolor is an object that could not have been reproduced in Dürer’s time (except by making an engraving after it: still not the object, but a representation of it). Even in our time, there is only one original, living in a museum in Vienna. I imagine it is behind glass, if on display, as drawings almost always are when in museums. The glass says precious. The character of painting—to make an image be singular—also says, in the language of the contemporary fine art economy, precious, though the insurance value of this work is not what matters to me. I don’t even think about that kind of precious when I look at this image.

There is only one of this image. It cannot reproduce itself. The original remains original. And yet it is not the image of a mysterious, extraordinary being surrounded by the tools of erudition and skill. It is an image of beings from our daily lives. So—precious what? The character of the medium discloses the dignity and importance and meaning of the subject: these ordinary plants are precious.

Precious weeds, precious grasses, precious dirt. Precious looking and precious record of having looked. Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf is one of my favorite pictures in the world, because it looks so carefully at something so ordinary. This picture reminds me that very little separates artists’ looking from ordinary looking: just time, attention, repetition, and care. And all of those, like plants, only require cultivation to come into flower. The sources of artmaking aren’t far away: they are right here. All we have to do is look, and look again, at what is nearby—often so nearby as to be invisible to us. Look again. And again.

In two weeks I’ll return to this image and think about it again. I’ll also record an exercise for writing-thinking-being that arises from this image. Thank you for reading—and being—here.

New paintings by Abe at Washington, D.C.’s Terzo Piano Gallery (until 18 March)

A garden manual called Sakuteiki, written by the 13th century and still in existence, begins the work of making a garden with an instruction for the setting of stones: to set them correctly, the text goes, you must first have a sense of the whole garden. The world is implicit in each element, the instruction implies; not only in the finished array, but in the siting of the first part. Every finished thing grows from the relations between each of its parts to what is around them.

The history of gardening is a history of the relation between the large and the small, the uncontrollable and the at-hand, the manageable and the unimaginable. The garden is a universe in miniature, a version of the world that can be surveyed and cared for even as the world outside the garden’s gates unleashes disaster or veers toward human-made catastrophe. In the garden, and likewise in the landscape painting, we have a world that at is at once contained and transcendent. The garden points to the universe; the stone to the entire vista.

In Harumi Abe‘s paintings, on view at Terzo Piano Gallery in D.C. until the 18th of March (extended), this principle of relation between small and large is at work. Abe’s fascination with making painted landscapes has been with her since childhood—in conversation, she recalls a landscape painted in elementary school, which remains, in her memory, in conversation with her adult work. Her primary genre over the past ten years has been the landscape, both remembered and observed.

The history of garden-making and landscape painting share a resemblance. The 13th-century garden manual was at first a manual of secrets, to which only the wealthiest or most privileged had access. The tradition of western landscape painting begins in parallel with capital’s earliest accumulations, becoming a way to capture, keep, and display the spoils of empire and colonization. To Abe, however, a landscape is not a thing to be looked at so much as it is a system of relations she attempts to capture in paint. In her work, the landscape painting meets the garden in the space of everyday life. Both will teach us and delight us—and, sometimes, bewilder and terrify us—if we will only let them.

In conversation, Abe considers her current and past work, thinking through the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque. She draws relations between how she makes her paintings and her life as an immigrant to the US, as well as to having grown up in Japan, in a family where art was always present. “My mother’s father was an artist,” Abe tells me, “and my mother wanted to be an artist, too, but her mother sent her to school to be a seamstress.” The relation between artmaking and the practical world of housekeeping and family economies seems central to Abe’s own work, an undercurrent through her paintings’ process.

Abe is interested in the relation between ordinary life and artmaking, between domestic landscapes and the landscape painting. Her paintings begin as photographs taken in her home garden, where she grows cucumbers, tomatoes, mangoes, bananas, loofa gourds, and much else—or they begin at local parks where she and her husband take their daughter to play. These locations are not incidental to Abe’s work: they are central to it. As an artist who is also and equally a parent, she has made a decision to make art where she makes her life. Like the stone that calls up an entire garden, Abe’s close gaze at her most immediate surroundings offers her paintings a way to think about climate change, natural disasters, the relationship between our human lives and the lifespan of galaxies, and the process of birth, life, death, decay, and rebirth itself. All these questions, and the question of what landscape painting can be, have entered Abe’s work as she attends to the landscapes that are closest at hand. “Paradise is within reach,” she tells me, clicking through a few slides, remarking on where she took the photographs that led to the paintings. “What we might think of as ‘heaven’ is part of our daily lives. I want my paintings to remind us that what we see is precious. Everything is alive, and everything dies. We have to pay attention.”

In earlier work, Abe’s paintings spliced remembered landscapes from her family’s home in Japan with the experience of living in Florida’s subtropical surroundings. In these paintings, the 2011 tsunami moves like a nightmare through villages overlaid with Floridian vegetation. The devastation of the world interacts with its preciousness: beauty and terror together. Abe has long thought about the question of sublimity, but sees her newer work as a movement toward Gilpin’s picturesque, where beauty and sublimity mediate one another. This reflects her own temperament—”I am a generally non-confrontational person,” she tells me—but also a recent interest in the history of Buddhism. “The Buddha said that it was better not to go to either extreme,” Abe tells me. “Good and bad, everything is dependent on everything else.” She sees her new paintings as trying to find a way of depicting landscapes that neither ignores the ferocity and harshness of nature, nor dwells exclusively on it—and modulates similarly in response to aesthetic pleasure. It’s about being able to see both the beauty in a garden and the human fear of the uncontrollable in it, she explains.

The paintings Abe has most recently been working on combine her attentive depiction of plant forms with poured, dripped, and dragged marks that recall the images of galaxies sent back by deep space telescopes. The south Florida coast offers a setting that is rich in texture and color, which Abe brings into her paintings. But as she described to me the experience of seeing a NASA spacecraft take distant flight while on a nighttime bike ride not far from her home, I could see that the Florida landscape’s effect on Abe’s paintings is not only present in the lushness of her colors, the brilliance with which she paints light, or the way palms and other local plants appear across her work. It is also evident in how space exploration has entered her metaphorical and imagistic imagination. In the newer series of paintings, images of galaxies ground the arrays of the Floridian plants that appear as a constant in the last decade of Abe’s work. When I ask about this, she replies, “I have been thinking about the way I am an ‘alien’ here. I have an ‘alien’ card. I am not naturalized. But I have found a way to live in this landscape.” The galaxy bursts through the palm grove; the nebula becomes fertile ground for a constellation of orchids. A stone, in its proper place, predicts a universe that forms around it. The landscape painting holds a glimpse of paradise still for one moment, so that we can recognize how ephemeral the beauty of our everyday surroundings truly is.

Harumi Abe, “A Stone, A Universe” at Terzo Piano Gallery, 1515 14th st NW, Third Floor, Washington, D.C. Until March 18; check website for opening times. This exhibition was reviewed in the Washington Post here.

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March 5, 2023