Like the multitude of sounds from a Victrola — not just the music, but the surface noise, the crickly-crackly needle drag, the silence it leaves us in when the music is over. Like the energizing effect of long-wave light from the sun on our mitochondria, whilst digging, hands in the dirt — ungardening. Like a photograph printed from a negative with the unspoken back story of hands in chemicals, silver splash, crudely cut tools dodging shadows, the smudge, the hunger of hours. The way raw milk cheese made in old wooden barrels creates a living ecosystem offering more protection, more resonance, and more weird.
The record, the light, the film, and the cheese all contain layers of information we are slowly beginning to understand. And yet we have replaced them with endlessness, fragmentation, jolting, — and worse, consistency.
The never silence.
In the old things, the same fullness remains. The life and wear and marks of hands and time on old tools and materials, give a restorative, accumulating vitality to a mark freshly made upon the page, to a book freshly bound. When I find a new-to-me tool or material or object, I invite it in to discover the marks it makes, and the place it holds in my world, upon my desk. This is how I find the magic in old things — the unexpected flutter.
The world is richer than our excessive and too tidy reproductions of it. Some things are long felt before they are understood.
I have so many stories of found things and their effects to tell. The ruling pen is an exciting one. I was introduced to them by Lisa Brown a few years ago during an excursion we made into the wilderness along with Dasha. (Thank you Lisa!)
We need to hold onto these things, and to share them. And to allow them to move through us, and loosen stuck things.
The irony here is that in trying to articulate this to share digitally, I didn’t make any good marks yesterday. My time was spent in the telling, in the adding to the endless excess. But here I am. And now I shall attempt to loosen a self portrait.
I did it! With yesterday’s unfinished thought added to today. Days 33 and 34 of #the100dayprojecy . Me twice. Like old images I used to make photographically, but this one, inadvertently shaped like an hourglass. Oh dear.
Love everything - your excess, your sparing of old usefulnesses, your selves. Always a treat Margaux.
Bark! Bark! Pearl! Breaking through the silence.
Good on every level.
My little one, Arwen, has been barking more lately since she lost her good friend, Annie, and is filled with the uncertainty that maybe we all are going to be lost to her.