Monthly Archives: December 2010

The End, part 2 : : Gallimaufry

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gallimaufry |ˌgaləˈmôfrē| noun a confused jumble or medley of things, a dish made of leftovers. ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from archaic French galimafrée ‘unappetizing dish,’ perhaps from Old French galer ‘have fun’ + Picard mafrer ‘eat copious quantities.’

One last mixed bag of pictures from this year, because I didn’t post to my blog as often as I should have/could have—a pity because some of these deserve at least a cursory look, and I wouldn’t feel right posting or writing about these pictures any time in 2011…there is bound to be so much new material to work with and digest next year, why serve up leftovers?

The Year in Embroidery…

Left to right, from the top: 1)Faster, Pussycat! Movie-based embroidery for the Phat Quarter swap; 2)The Key To The Door In The Mountain embroidery on tulle in a cigar tin, inspired by a poem by Jean Valentine, for the Darwin Visual Arts Association’s Annual Member’s Show; 3)Allium Flora journal (Book 876); my first attempt at the technique in soandso’s book The Embroiderer’s Floral 4)The Sorceress of Serendip, 3D art doll on a journal cover; 5)Red brocade Spool Bird, red cotton floss on linen. My take on the bird softie pattern available on Spoolsewing.com’s site; 6)Nightmare, blackwork on black Moleskine cahier for The Sketchbook Project 2011 in Brooklyn, NY; 7)okay, you’re sick of these felt cookies. So am I! 8.) Book 879, appliquéd, quilted and embroidered journal, now the property of Mademoiselle Dassenoy, who went home to Belgium; 9)my first Spool bird, done in regular fabrics…eventually went on a journey by bicycle through the Tanami Desert, as my Belovéd’s mascot.

A Daytrip to Kakadu National Park…

Left to right, from the top: 1)My Beloved’s rough and rather unlovely toes serve as a background to some amazingly small works of wild beauty; 2) & 3) local flora; 4)bushfire in the mulga; 5)a prehistoric penthouse with amazing views, at the top of Ubirri; 6) & 7)more nature shots… 8)the ubiquitous sun-bleached beer can tells you two things: Aussies love their beer, and some people are filthy swine; 9) & 10)views of the floodlands and sky, from the top of Ubirri; 11)an aboriginal rock painting of Namarrgon, the Lightning Man, at 12)a rosella flower, taken at Bukbukluk

Bits & Pieces Of Life…

Just a few of the reasons why I loved 2010 (left to right, starting at the top):

  1. a new bicycle! Ruby Belle…white-walled tires, chain guard, wicker basket…she’s just the cutest little thing! I love my treadlie…I never learned to drive a car, and a few years ago I realized that I no longer want to learn. Bikes are Better, in Every Way.
  2. fun photo shoots with my friend Melanie, and my honorary godchild, Charlotte. They went back to Germany for good just a few weeks ago. I will miss them both. Charlotte was my favorite photo subject…spontaneous and full of life, a delightful little girl.
  3. moulding and casting workshop with Ewan Wood…I have always wanted to know how to cast little things, and Ewan gave us a great little introduction to the craft. Ewan himself does amazing work for museums and such, producing life-like reproductions of anything, from potatoes to crocodiles; he was my studio neighbor at the Darwin Visual Arts Association, and whenever he was painting one of his crocodiles I would hang around to watch and just be a general pest…
  4. homegrown tomatoes! Our first crop on the boat…they were really sweet, lusscious and YUMMY!
  5. the iSmoke, my hubby’s piece for the DVAA Annual Member’s Show, makes fun of Apple products, geeks, smokers, and consumers, with his gadget in a cigar tin.
  6. I drew my life! Well, for a few days, anyway, just small parts of my life. Inspired by Michael Nobbs’s Start to Draw Your Life e-book, and the rest of his Sustainably Creative blog.
  7. Kris made a few sculptures this year…my favorite is his snail-powered recumbent bicycle. This was meant to go into the Sculpture in The Park, but that show didn’t go ahead this year, due to administrative and bureaucratic difficulties. We did a fun photo shoot for the piece at the Holmes Jungle.
  8. I got the 750 Words habit…and then fell off the wagon a few days before I hit the 100 day mark and 100,000 words. Lost all my badges, and never even got a glimpse of that Pheonix. Too funny, dropping the ball like that, just when you think “it’s all sweet downhill coasting from here”…LOL I will crawl back on the wagon, as an effing ignominious egg, tonight. In the meantime, here’s a curious screenshot from the thoughts/emotions stats on one of my stranger days: Feeling mostly: HAPPY. Concerned mostly about: DEATH. wtf?
  9. Kris, on the recumbent bicycle he built at home, in the middle of his Old Tanami Track journey. He rode Some folks in 4-wheel drives stopped to take the pics, and were nice enough to e-mail them to us. All part of Kris’s love affair with solitude, big open spaces, adventure, the Outback, and bicycles The new book he has just finished writing, Bicycle Dreaming, launches in late January next year.

Q: What about the list, though, hmm?

A: List? what list?

Q: That one with all those things you said you were going to do…

A: Oh. That list. *sigh* I didn’t do too well with that list.

1. Fill a sketchbook with drawings (FAIL)

2. Join a group and complete a 365 photo challenge (FAIL)

3. grow a lovely veggie and flower garden on the boat …yeesh! (FAIL)(Note: I have tomatoes and basil, so not a total failure. But not the self-reliant gardening I initially wanted.)

4. “Random Acts of Crewelty” : Have An Exhibit in 2011 (okay, not technically over yet, there’s hope for this one!)

5. The Phat Quarter Swap: Movies!

6. Sew a Spool Bird: “Red Brocade Bird”

7. Sew at least one item with each of the patterns in my collection (FAIL)

8. Make a group of 15 journals using the Allium flower technique (Note: I have made 3 journals with Allium flowers on them.)

9. Framed, embroidered pendants and jewelry (FAIL)

10. Read 10 books before the end of the year

11. Use up all my small canvases…paint lots of small paintings! (FAIL)

12. Write 4 poems (FAIL…no, make that SPECTACULAR FAIL!)

13. Craft a series of patchworked journals and mini quilts (20) (FAIL, FAIL, FAIL)

14. Craft 12 Bijou (miniature) books using existing materials (FAIL)

15. Complete the August Challenge on 750Words.com

Who gives a rat’s ass, anyway? *laughs out loud*

Meh, better luck next year!

Happy New Year, everybody!

Postcards from The Archipelago

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Deep sea was the wandering,
deep brass the dripping loot,
deep crimson the bloodspill,
lyrics begotten on lush lips
and many a hawser they saw—
rotting rope and rusting chain
and anchors…many lost anchors.

—Carl Sandburg

Finished painting the first of that small batch of journal cases (covers) I made recently. It’s called Postcards from The Archipelago, and this is the second time I’ve painted these designs on a cover; the first time was for a little journal that I gave to my Belovéd.

It’s a very special little pair of paintings I’ve put on here, full of significance, wonderful memories, and love, love, love…so now I don’t want to sell it! I won’t be in a  hurry to sell it, anyway…it must go to someone who really resonates with it…someone who has lived close to the sea, or has lain in the dark at night listening to the ‘bulge and nuzzle’ of the waves, has loved a pirate, has “sailed away for a year and a day”…or someone who has pulled up his/her anchors (or is about to) and is open to the adventure that life can become when you don’t know where you’re going, only that you’ve got to go…

*Is she serious?* Okay, I can hardly insist on these conditions…(can’t you just see me, though, interviewing prospective buyers? *crazy laugh*) I guess all I am trying to say is:     I love this one so much and I hope someone out there will love it, too. You’ll find it in my Etsy and Madeit shops very soon.

The story behind the covers…

There’s a golden compass on the spine, surrounded by curling tendrils of seaweed. The cover paintings both have landscape formats (to look like postcards), so that either side can be the ‘front’ of this journal (and I’ve put ‘headbands’ on both ends of the book, so you can decide which is front for you).

On one cover is my version of an old woodblock print showing a sea monster attacking a ship. I love the old accounts of monsters and terrors of the deep, love the fact that they were made in all seriousness, to illustrate real accounts made by sailors and travelers. When I met Kris he was in the process of compiling an old-fashioned bestiary of fantastic creatures from all over the world. He had stacks of research, and had painstakingly done a painting for every creature on his list. I loved that he would devote so much of his time and energy doing something purely personal, entirely for his own pleasure and of no immediate use to anyone else at all.

Beside the sea monster vignette is a tiny map of the Bacuit Archipelago, which is where Kris and I met, and where we lived in a fisherman’s hut on the beach for many years. That little boat with the Chinese junk rig is Kehaar, Kris’ sailboat. On the bit of land to the right, just under the name El Nido, hic sunt leonis (here there be lions) marks the spot where we lived, with our two fat cats (lions!) ruling that part of the jungle.

On the other cover are fragments of Carl Sandburg’s poem, and a painting of Kehaar on the sea at night. The little portholes glow with the light of candles inside, a fingerail-paring of moon hangs overhead, and the sky is salted with stars.

When Kris decided that he wanted to return to Australia after 13 years being away, we made the trip by sailboat. It took us five weeks to reach East Timor, and another 10 days from Timor to Darwin, Australia. Kris has a lot of respect for the men who crossed the world’s oceans in the days before the engine was invented, and he likes that kind of old-fashioned self-reliance. Hence, Kehaar is just a sailboat. There is no engine on board. There is no GPS, radio, EPIRB, toilet, lights or electricity on board, either, for that matter.

It was Real Sailing: perfectly silent, isolated, and oftentimes, slow. Time opened like origami…we had time…plenty of time. There was no need to hurry…what for? Three days without wind meant we sat on deck in patches of shade, talking or doing some small, intricate chore, just trying to stay busy until the wind picked up again. Kris wrote for his book or drew monsters and patterns in the borders of his sailing charts; I sat embroidering, or reading. We spent hours staring at the horizon, sometimes. At night, when it was my turn to steer, I had conversations with myself, sang every song I knew—a lot of Basia, isn’t that daggy?—wished on shooting stars (there were hundreds) and tried to learn the major constellations. Herds of whales would surface around us and blast smelly water into the air; pods of dolphins raced with us when we were going fast; sea birds—boobies, mainly—hung around for days, resting en route to god-knows-where. We saw turtles the size of picnic tables (before they saw us…another advantage to sailing without an engine!) and lots of sea snakes. Sharks trailed behind us in some seas. One night while I was steering in a strong wind, something big (the size of our boat) swam beside us for half an hour (the sea is pitch dark, but when the tiny bits of plankton are disturbed, they emit a bright glow or phosphoresence that will reveal the outline of larger fish, dolphins, anything moving fast enough to alarm the little guys) and it scared me a bit!

It was a big adventure, and a big move for me, but Kris had given (a somewhat trying) life in the Third World a go, for my sake, so I thought it was only fair that I spend some time in his country. It was difficult at first, took me a year to find my own place in the scheme of things. But I’ve fallen in love with Oz, and Darwin in particular, and there are no plans of sailing away again for a long while!

The Consolations of Creativity

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Yes, still mucking around with the felt shapes! I am playing with the heart shape, now. Kris rolls his eyes in disbelief… he’s never seen me work with hearts before; it’s not a typical motif for me, admittedly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I’m actually just daunted by the symbol: it’s so old and so universal that pretty much anything you could think of doing with it has been done. Trying to find a way of making these felt hearts that doesn’t look like everyone else’s felt hearts can be challenging. I threw myself into the task today, cutting 100 heart shapes out of felt and playing with colour combinations (limited, because I have a very small felt stash of odd colours that I didn’t give much thought to when I bought them; my self-imposed rule is that I have to use old materials up, not buy more!) I braced myself with lashings of black coffee, and music from the 80s. It is such a joy to be able to spend the days this way: intense, busy, engaged, mindful…but doing what I love, and making things that I love.

I started reading Alain de Botton‘s The Consolations of Philosophy last night…no doubt the last book I’ll manage to squeeze in before the year ends…and it would have to be the most enjoyable book of the year, too, wouldn’t it? When you find yourself giggling over a book about the ideas of Socrates, Epicurus and Seneca, you know you’ve got a very special philosophy book in your hands, and have found a very special author. Alain de Botton’s humour is so gentle that it works on you slowly, and at first you don’t know whether he’s being funny, or you are. *pregnant pause* This is where I warn you that mine is a black and evil heart, and I have a taste for the funny that runs to morbid. There, a caveat.
The book’s six parts detail philosophy’s consolations for Unpopularity, for Not Having Enough Money, for Frustration, Inadequacy, a Broken Heart, and Difficulties. Part of what I thought was so funny was having to agree with the author (and his philosophers)that “Yes, we humans do make a big technicolor drama out of some ridiculous things, don’t we?” Fifteen pages into the book, I had a silly smile on my face…and by the time I had read halfway, I was laughing out loud. Kris kept looking up from his drawing to check that I was still reading the same book, he couldn’t believe that such a title was making me chuckle. The ideas, of course, are delightfully presented, too…applied to modern life, clearly outlined and presented in a levelheaded way, this is a good introduction to a handful of Western Civilization’s greatest thinkers.

Kris Larsen's With Mermaid Up A Moonberry TreeOther books I read in 2010 were: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and The Discomfort Zone and How To Be Alone; Edward de Bono‘s Six Thinking Hats; Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Everything is Illuminated; David Malouf‘s Ransom; John Banville‘s The Infinities; a whole bunch of books from The New Glucose Revolution series; Martin Versfeld’s The Philosopher’s Cookbook; DBC Pierre‘s Ludmilla’s Broken English; Plain Anne Ellis by Anne Ellis, and my partner, Kris’s, second book, With Mermaid up A Moonberry Tree (which made me cry buckets, but only because it was about the way Kris and I used to live)…and I can’t remember if I read anything else.

Sure doesn’t seem like much! I really hope I manage to do more reading next year…I had a reading list in 2009, but I don’t think any of the books I finally did read were on my list! I find that life very often leads me to, or presents me with, the books that I need to read…do you get that? When something you pick up and start reading speaks directly to who you are, where you are, at that moment? That wouldn’t happen if you were just going down a list and ticking them off as you went, would it? There are advantages to allowing serendipity to choose your books for you. I think I’d like to read more nonfiction next year, but no idea which ones. Mainly books about how to live well, that sort of thing. Like a more gentle, garden variety philosophy, for days when you have your period and can’t focus on Socrates.

What was your favourite read for 2010? Have you got a reading list for 2011, or do you just read whatever comes your way?

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The End, part 1:: Stay Changed Always

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Each year receives a name at its end—a word or phrase to hold its essence, a name to remember it by. So much has happened this 2010 that it’s hard to settle on a name…I’ve decided on something very general, though it really does gather all of the year into one firm hand:

The year of change

On Christmas day of 2009 I found a lump in my breast. It turned out to be nothing, however the full medical check-up I underwent at the start of 2010 disclosed that I was pre-diabetic (blood sugar levels not quite diabetic yet, but getting there,) had hypothyroidism, an unusually low blood pressure, and was overweight by 23 kilos. So I committed to making some big changes in my life:

I quit smoking. Initially I found ii-ne-kore’s diary of a quitter inspiring, but as she slowly slid off the wagon and gave up I turned to, and got real help, from QuitCoach.

I read dozens of books on pre-diabetes. The New Glucose Revolution and all the other titles in that series were the most helpful; I learned how to make better choices from among the foods and ingredients that I liked, instead of going on some sad, unrealistic diet of deprivation—like the truly hair-brained “Lemonade, Sea-water and Laxatives” diet that some misguided family members talked me into doing for 10 days in 2007!

I went to a dietitian and a diabetes educator for advice (and then I followed that advice!) and joined the local diabetes health organization.

I switched to a low GI and low fat diet:
I turned my back on potatoes, on bread, pastries and all flour-based foods, on rice (an Asian who can’t eat rice! Still, my days of creativity and life are worth more than all the world’s bowls of freshly steamed rice…)on candies and jellybeans (not a problem, I never liked them) and anything made with glucose (Greek Halvah, alas!) Said goodbye to all noodles (except soba and bean thread,) to processed meats, to butter, and to all but a thin sliver, a mere shaving, an occasional crumb of cheese.
I still enjoy beautiful food. I have turned to pasta with elaborate sauces of roasted tomato, grilled eggplants, basil and kangaroo fillets…to bulgur as tabbouleh or as a spiced bed for fiery vindaloo…to rich dhals of chickpea or split yellow pea or mung beans…to avocado and smoked salmon on a mound of fresh salad sprinkled with toasted seeds and walnuts…to bowls of fruit tossed with pure floral honey and yogurt. I watch my portion sizes. I don’t feel like someone on a strict diet!

I started taking the daily hormone for my hypothyroidism.

I went to a doctor and paid her to design a workout program for me. I enrolled in a good gym, and went there three days a week. I also asked my husband to build and install a simple workout bench on the deck of our boat. I bought several pairs of dumbells and a yoga mat. I use them on the days that I don’t go to the gym and it isn’t pouring rain.

The results? I’ve had 6 or 8 cigarettes in the past year. I no longer dream that I am smoking, either. In October I had the blood sugar of a normal person (no longer pre-diabetic), my thyroid antibody levels were down, my blood pressure was unremarkable, and I had lost 13 kgs (28 lbs). Needless to say, I really do feel very good, and I’ve gone from a size 18 to a 12 (at some shops I’m a 10). So yes, it did pay off in a very satisfying way, and my initial success has done wonders for my willpower and self-esteem. That sounds like a mouthful of New Age crap, but it’s true.

It doesn’t end here, of course…I know I can never go back to living the way I used to…and why would I want to, when that way obviously wasn’t working for me? I haven’t had this much energy and verve for years.

I don’t know where the strength to change so many things, so quickly, came from, but I am grateful that it came, and that it stayed with me through the year.
Fear played a part: that lump that started me on my journey of personal health. Nothing like the hint of cancer to make a girl sit up and take notice.
Honesty, too…my grandmother and mother both developed full-blown diabetes—my mother is now blind in one eye because she ignored the many, many years of warning signs, and lived as though she believed she was somehow above it all, or that it would, in passing, spare her for some special reason—and I had to finally face the hard fact that I had inherited the tendency to become diabetic; that, unless I made special efforts to avoid it, it would come for me, too, and that I would suffer as I got older.

And having reasons to live and stay healthy will often help turn a sea of unresolved grays into clear black-and-white choices. Kris, my partner and best friend, whom I love more than I love anyone or anything else in my world, is an active, adventurous, healthy man full of passion for life; looking after myself is one way of loving and respecting him, as well as being able to accompany him and share those adventures.

Also, there is that joy beyond words—the ardour, excitement, and intense satisfaction—that I get from other people’s art, and from making things, myself. I love getting up in the morning and taking a book of poems from a shelf, to enjoy with my coffee…or sitting in the dark with my headphones on, adrift on a sea of music… almost as much as I love being able to spend my days in my studio, deep in creative mindfulness… wholly engaged in the playful act of making something, where there was nothing.

These are my reasons for changing, and hoping to stay changed. How could I keep following my old ways, when there was so much beauty and joy and love at stake?

Slow days of brilliant color

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We can finally hear the difference: less cars on the roads now; that ever-present hum of traffic has died down to the occasional rubber-burning hoon (with a lone police car in pursuit)…a wonderful silence is building as the long holidays approach. *bliss*

What have you been doing with the last slow days of the year?

I have been stitching more of these bright little felt rondels. They shape up quickly, and are a good way to get a color scheme or a combination of embroidery stitches out of your system.

colorful embroidered felt rondels that look like cookies. or flowers. or doilies.

 

Still not sure what I’ll do with them all, but I did quit my day job not long ago, so I will probably try to sell them. Should I pop them onto journals? Or make pendants, or ornaments, or brooches out of them? Hmm…what do you think? I’d love to hear your ideas, I’m hopeless at these things!

Also…I made cases for 5 flat-backed, case-bound journals. They’re covered in primed artist’s canvas (ready to paint on when the mood strikes!)…

white case

…And, while I was making the cases, I photographed the steps for a tutorial on case-making—for the students of my bookbinding workshops (though I have just realized that I won’t be around to teach Term 1 next year! *sad* But I’ll be doing Terms 2-4, for sure!)

And I made miso soup with tofu, wakame, shiitake slivers, and a sprinkle of gomasso for lunch…(I just added this in so that I seem busier than I actually was…)

How about you?

So this is Festivus, and what have I done? | definatalie.com

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From one of my favorite bloggers comes this timely post:

So this is Festivus, and what have I done? Some new traditions, here, for this time of the year…less, um, glittery, but probably much truer to the human condition…

I laughed out loud to read Natalie Perkins’ grinchy post about the holiday madness… a few more girls (those clever Natalies, preferably, and fat ones, please!) and we’ll have a formidable movement!

clowns protest santacon

Image by pinguino via Flickr

Festive Faking for the Holidays

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I have been experimenting with felt circles and embroidery for the past two days. I was trying to make flowers but—and I blame the Morphic field for this—everything I have made so far looks like an elaborately decorated cookie. Better than actually baking trays of cookies, at least. Me and sugar, we don’t like each other much.

At a time of the year when everyone in the Christianized world is baking pretty things, or is preoccupied with eating and decorating, with buying yet more things, and with social get-togethers of one kind or another, my lover and I are settling in for a couple of quiet weeks at home, to read some books, draw and paint, to make things, and ride out the Christmas storm on our boat…with the pelicans and the crocodiles, who don’t give a damn about it either.

We don’t make a big deal out of Christmas in my home.  I long ago decided that, as far as  my life was concerned,  the cons of Christianity far outweighed the pros. And if I can’t get excited about the substance behind the holiday, then I can’t really work up much enthusiasm for the empty shell of overeating, enforced heartiness, compulsory family reunions and frantic shopping that’s left. Furthermore, my belovéd and husband, Kris, was raised by atheist parents in communist Russia; when he did espouse a religion, he chose Islam, for its sobriety, circumspection, and austerity.

I, on the other hand, was raised in the Philippines, where the holiday that commemorates the birth of a boy to a Jewish-Aramaic couple takes the form of a nationwide hysteria that brings forth, among other delights,  13-hour gridlock traffic jams in the cities, a sharp incline in crime, and a plague of street-hardened-urchins-turned-’carolers’ who descend upon people’s homes as soon as night falls, banging on large tin cans as viciously as they are able, shouting—

shouting, not singing (in their whole lives have these rough little imps heard a single word that was gently sung and not shrieked threateningly at them?)

—their carols in words so far removed from the language they were originally written in that they could not be more meaningless if they had been taken from the Ket language of Central Siberia (these kids don’t have a clue as to what they’re bellowing, it’s just a tradition of the season, god help us, and a lucrative one, and so it thrives.)

Quiet folk, who work for miserable wages all year so they can spend it at this time, escape their own homes (and the thirty groups of carolers that nightly beleaguer them) by going to the malls, where the Christmas decorations have been sparkling, and the Christmas music has been on shuffle-repeat, since October. It is also a tradition to squeeze, with thousands of others like them, into the parking lots, onto the escalators, into the food courts, down the shop aisles, and past the deft hands of the pickpockets of whom—along with traffic cops, urchins, beggars and muggers—it can honestly be said, love and value this time of the year more than anyone else.

To my adopted country, Australia,

You cannot imagine how refreshing it was to arrive in a city where “the Christmas Spirit” didn’t follow you home, caterwaul outside your front door in a pack, prowl around the back of your house nicking any small thing that was foolishly left in the garden (like the stepladder at my mom’s house, last year), and then run a roofing nail along the side of your car as it left. Thank you for leaving us in peace. I love you.

XXX, N.

Christmas dinner at home, when the last of the carolers had rattled noisily away at 10 p.m., was an emotionally fraught affair. The combined stresses of having to endure your family and possibly other relatives for long stretches of time (maybe even having gone shopping and then sat in 4 hours of traffic with them), Mum’s brittle exhaustion from having done “all the work”, Dad’s peevish, infantile insistence that nobody touch the food on the table until he had taken a dozen blah photographs of it (like we would never eat again? it’s just food. get over it. we’re starving. it’s late.), the bickering that would break out among us while we were eating, and then more fights after dinner as paterfamilias tried to drag everyone to church for the midnight service, despite our feeling quite the opposite of loving, peaceful, joyful…

Santa suit in the bottom drawerOh, Christmas! Your every little scrap of prescribed, fabricated festivity, the comic wretchedness of the Christian, suburban, middle-class family bound by tradition to punish itself this way, year after year, is lodged in my memory like the splintered bones of roast bird. I consider myself lucky to have escaped your rosy red claws, at last.

If you are crazy about your family, you don’t need a time like Christmas to remind yourself or to display that affection. If you’re not all that crazy about your family, not even Christmas with The Puppini Sisters in Dolby Sound can make it better.

edward estlin cummings

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…such was a poet and shall be and is

—who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend
a sunbeam’s architecture with his life:
and carve immortal jungles of despair
to hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand

excerpt from “no man, if men are gods;” from 1 X 1 [One Times One] by e.e.cummings

e.e. cummings. At last.

I was introduced to his poetry in 1991, as a freshman at uni, by the sculptor and artist Jenny Cortes(then apprentice of the not-always-lovable-but-certainly-never-boring master sculptor Jerry Araos)…I wonder where she is now…

Bookstores in Manila were still very basic in the 90s; a ‘poetry section’ was usually thirty books—’treasuries’, mostly, of love poems, or the ubiquitous university-sanctioned collections of dead poets—languishing alongside those cheap edition paperback classics  that only high school students bought, and only because they were forced to write book reports on them. No one had ever heard of e.e.cummings.

I found him in the state university’s library…crumbling yellow pages in books that had long ago been rebound by the university librarians in their trademark ugly maroon bookcloth, with the pocked orange peel texture, and the blurry gold-stamped title in condensed (Orator?) all-caps on the spine.

The idiosyncratic way he played with the language,—the words rattling, dancing around on the page the way phrases often did in my own head—the romantic love sonnets given a jazzy twist…the satire and humor in his poems about war or about humanity…endeared themselves to me, and I have loved this poet ever since. He was like Gertrude Stein, minus the deutschkopf and the German-Jewish baggage.

I copied 370 of his poems by hand into a big notebook, and they were all that I ever had on paper of his works.

e.e.cummings Complete Poems 1904-1964Then I moved to Darwin and found his Complete Poems 1904-1962 at the local library.  From then on the library and I entered into a sort of ‘joint ownership’ of the book (not that they realized what was going on) where I would borrow the Complete Poems of e.e.cummings, keep it the full month, renew my borrowing twice (the maximum number of renewals permitted) and then reluctantly bring the book back to them after having had it for three months. The day after I had brought it back, I would go and take it out again. I think I have had that library book in my possession for nearly a year, all counted. I once went back to borrow it again, and was told that it was out. I was happy to know that someone else in Darwin read cummings, but I also couldn’t relax until it reappeared on the library’s shelves.

Crazy lady. Uh huh.

Then last October I finally did what I should have done fifteen years ago: I hunted down and bought my own copy of Complete Poems. No more stalking the librarians of the Council Library…

at last perfection,now and here

—but look:not sunlight?yes!

and(plunging rapturously up)

we spill our masterpiece

“to start,to hesitate;to stop” from XAIPE by e.e.cummings