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Tuesday, August 4 update: my essay, "Becoming Canadian," is now online at the Montreal Gazette.
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earlier: The Montreal Gazette is considering an edited version of the essay I posted yesterday for publication next week, so I've taken it down for the moment. If it does appear, which seems likely, I'll post a link. Thanks to those who wrote, shared, and commented. I'm really happy to be at the end of this process, and to finally be a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.!
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Why do we draw what we do? I'm always curious about this and never feel like I know the answer completely. Obviously, something attracts our eye with a feeling of curiosity, beauty, complexity, color...usually I can identify that initial impulse. Some people want to make a record of where they were at a particular time -- and all sketches do this to some extent. But I suspect that for me there's often a deeper psychological reason: an identification with the subject or even a repulsion in some way, some sense that the subject reflects something that is going on inside.
As you're probably all too aware, I often draw my desk and the stuff that I've accumulated there, either by chance or by design. In recent years I've become interested in the way the same objects take on new or different meanings when juxtaposed with others; a number of artists have done this with still life arrangements in their work, where the same objects appear repeatedly but "feel" different depending on other choices the artist has made.
These seed pods and other little objects live in a brass bowl on the top of the desk; sometimes I take them out to look at them separately, but more often they just stay there, getting dusty. The other night when I began drawing this bowl of small objects I was feeling unsettled and tired, and like I wasn't getting anything done. I knew that drawing something would make me feel better, but I was sort of surprised to find myself choosing this subject. In retrospect, I think it was perfect, because the objects contained within the bowl, without anything else around them, seemed to represent a microcosm of life, a small world of objects in relationship to one another only because something larger has placed them in a bowl together. A sort of chaos, but a contained chaos. It was up to me to search out some way for each form to have its equal place and meaning.
Is it a good drawing? That question doesn't matter to me as much as the fact that the doing of it showed me something, and helped me over a small rough patch.
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On Saturday, I received the terrible news of the sudden death of David S., a close friend of mine from college. Since then I've been grieving, remembering, and trying to adjust to the strange new reality that such a death always brings.
Below is a post I wrote about him back in 2008, and I wanted to republish it here, in his memory: the story makes me hear his laugh and the music we used to make together, and remember the happiness of that crazy, hot summer of 1972, when we were so young and the complicated chess game of life still seemed to lie far ahead of us. Our paths eventually went in different directions, but we stayed in touch. I will always be grateful to David for his love and ongoing friendship, for the happy memories of the time we spent together, his encouragement of me as a person and as a musician. I never remember him saying an unkind word to me; he was a loyal, honest, and true friend, totally without pretense, who believed in each person's essential freedom.
I've searched for a photograph I know exists somewhere, of David silhouetted against a window of our house at the lake, studying a chessboard. It hasn't turned up yet. So this photograph of Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassky will begin the post, and at the end, there's a blurry photo of David and me at the end of a Gershwin concert we gave in 1974, at Risley Residential College at Cornell, just before graduation. We had split up two years before, but the enduring friendship is pretty clear from the photograph. After college we saw each other from time to time; he played recorder and guitar when Jonathan and I got married on a Vermont hilltop. In recent years we kept in touch through FB and email, and I deeply regret how long it's been since we saw each other in person or talked on the phone.
This has been a difficult summer in that regard: in quick succession I've lost three close friends, all men of my age, who I've known since childhood or young adulthood. None of those deaths were expected. I feel shaken, vulnerable, and sad, but also grateful for the opportunities it's given me to look back and think deeply about earlier times in my life: who I was then, what those friendships were based on, and why these people mattered so much to me.
Bobby Fisher in Queens
1972. A small bedroom in a small duplex in a nondescript section of Queens. On the unmade bed, two twenty-year-olds: a girl with blue eyes, long blond hair and wire-rim glasses; a boy with a mane of unruly dark curls, an eastern European face, a thick beard. He drums his fingers on the mattress in a pattern she recognizes as the second fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier; she smiles to herself and turns over onto her stomach, propping her head up with her hands. She wears cut-off jeans and a tank top. The boy is in a white t-shirt and boxer shorts. The room is sweltering; a fan runs in one corner but seems to barely stir the humid air. But except for an absent-minded hand that brushes the curls off the boy's wet forehead, the two don't seem to notice; their attention is elsewhere.
At the foot of the bed is a folding table, and on the table a chess set, with the pieces arranged in the middle of a game: black on the left, white on the right. Beyond the chessboard is a black-and-white television. On the screen, a young announcer is seated behind a counter; there's a clock on the wall behind him, and when the camera moves to the side, a large chessboard with the pieces indicated by their normal symbols. The arrangement of the pieces on the chessboard in the room mirrors the game on the television screen. The young couple studies the board, and waits. The television announcer - a young American chess amateur named Shelby Lyman - studies the game on the wall of the studio; he's somewhere in New York or New Jersey. He ponders the possible moves, explaining them to his unseen audience, as he waits for the next phone call from Iceland. Then, in an excited voice, he announces the move, and changes the position of the piece that Spassky or Fisher has willed into action. Often, it is a move that neither he nor anyone else has anticipated, including the young couple in the room who have been debating what might happen next.
The flurry of excitement over each move is followed, most often, by these long periods of confusion, incredulity, admiration, anticipation. Sometimes, though, the moves follow in rapid succession, leading up to yet another long series of pauses, or, occasionally, to a rapid denouement, with one player's sudden brilliant insight causing the death spiral of his opponent: check, check, checkmate. When that happens, the couple can barely keep up; they move to the edge of the bed, their legs dangling onto the floor, bodies leaning forward toward the television, hands poised over the boards as major pieces fall like towers under a wrecking ball -- and then sit back, shaking their heads, dazed -- until they remember they're hungry, and head off to the refrigerator in search of a piece of cheesecake and a quart of milk that they'll devour on the kitchen table.
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Her father had taught her to play chess when she was five, around the same time she learned to read music. She was an only child, and they had played together quite a lot in those early years. He rarely let her win. She liked the game well enough but didn't seem to develop the necessary competitive fire, or the desire to study chess books, opening sequences, end games. As she got older, the analytical side of her nature clearly preferred music, especially Bach, which she practiced on the old square piano in their upstairs hallway. Not many people played chess in their small upstate town; her father had a few friends he played with once in a while, and in the evenings they played bridge with her grandparents or friends of the family -- it was more social. But after she went away to college and began bringing home boyfriends, they more often than not answered "yes" to her father's immediate question: "Do you play chess?" and the weekend visits came to include long vigils over the chessboard as her father and her friend battled for supremacy.
David was the best of those players. The son of radical Jewish intellectuals from the city, he was a gifted player who had been raised on the game. His bond with the girl, though, was music: he was a fine, if sometimes undisciplined, pianist, and they had met in the common room of their university dorm one day when he was playing Gershwin on the baby grand, and she had come along and started singing the song, which she knew by heart. "All right!" he had said, his dark eyes looking up at her from the mop of hair. "How about another?" They found out they shared the same politics, the same sense of humor, the same love of classical music. She had a gift for imitations, which cracked him up. He could play anything on the piano; she sang Schumann and Schubert lieder, show tunes, turned pages for him as he practiced Bach. The boyfriend she'd been dating all year didn't stand a chance.
In the summer, they were both working, but she took the bus to the city for a few long weekends. He met her at Port Authority on Friday afternoon, took her to a deli near the accounting firm where he worked, where the waitresses knew him by name and handed him a piece of pound cake without asking for his order. They looked at her approvingly, smiling, glad this melancholy, intense, sweet hippie had someone to penetrate his loneliness, someone besides the invisible piano he constantly played on the table-top beside his coffee.
They took the train out to Queens and walked to his parents' house, in a suburb of similar houses, trees, sidewalks. The days passed in a blur of oppressive heat. Sometimes in the evenings they played trios - the boy and his father on recorders, the girl on flute. His mother made them dinner, fussed over them, laughed at their jokes, sat at the kitchen table and talked. Most of the time they spent in the bedroom: fooling around, trying to sleep, and watching the chess matches.
It was a break from the war, the war that lay, thick and suffocating, over everything in those years. A personal future seemed unattainable. So they opposed the system until they were exhausted and then clung to the beauty they could grasp: music, art, young implausible love, and dazzling mythic battles fought on a remote island, played out on squares of black-and-white.
"Fisher's taken Spassky's rook!" Shelby Lyman cries.
"Wow," says the dark-haired boy, reaching out to remove the piece from the board. He tumbles the rook from hand to hand, staring at the screen. "Did you see that coming?"
"Not at all!" she answers, studying the new arrangement. "What will he do now?"
"I have no idea," he says, and pulls her down beside him, grinning. "Imitate Shelby again for me, will you? Come on, pleeeease?"
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Sunrise over the North Atlantic
"Excuse me, sir, are you going to London?" The old man who had been sitting next to me at Gate 60 for the past hour looked up from his small computer, and peered at me with bright blue eyes that were far more awake than mine.
"Yes...?"
"They've just announced a gate change. We're moving from here to Gate 54."
He glanced over his shoulder; most of the other passengers in the airport departure lounge had already gathered their bags and were moving slowly down the hall, shoulders slumped in resignation, travel pillows around their necks. It was past 11:00 pm on a perfectly clear early summer night, but for no apparent reason our flight had already been delayed for more than an hour. The Qatar Airlines flight to Dubai scheduled for the same time as ours, across the hall, had boarded and left long before; since I had arrived, two Air Canada flights had left from Gate 60 for Vancouver and Dublin. Except for our sold-out flight to Heathrow, the lounge was now deserted, and in the darkness beyond the sloping windows, I could see no British Airways jets waiting for us to board. "Gate 54..." my neighbor repeated the number, as if to himself, and thanked me.
"I'll walk over with you," I said, checking to see how much he had to carry. "Do you need any help?"
"No, no, I'm fine," he said, stowing his computer in a small backpack and getting to his feet without difficulty. He pulled out the handle of his rolling carry-on and snapped it into place. We rolled our bags around the ends of the rows of seating, and moved out into the central aisle, walking side by side. I looked at him from the corner of my eye, hoping I hadn't insulted him. "Are you going to London as well?" he asked: a predictable, polite response from someone who didn't really want to talk.
"Berlin," I said. "Do you live in England?"
He shook his head. "No, I'm going on from there." A hesitation. Then: "To Poland. And you?"
"I live here in Montreal -- I'm going to Berlin to visit friends. It will be my first time in that city." He smiled but made no response. "Do you have family in Poland?"
His eyes ran over my face like quick fingers. "No, I am alone," he said after a moment. "I live all over the world. I've been here in Montreal for a while -- an interesting city -- before that I was in Brazil, before that, Italy..."
He was a small man, shorter than me, wearing nondescript khaki trousers, a white shirt, running shoes, and a plain khaki baseball cap. He had bypassed the moving walkway, and seemed happy to stretch his legs after the long wait, pulling his carry-on without any apparent effort. I guessed his age to be at least 85, though it was hard to tell. His eyes were his most distinctive feature: awake, clear, very alive. When we arrived at the gate he chose a seat and removed his hat to reveal a nearly bald head with a few wisps of white hair. "What time did they announce for boarding?" he asked.
"I thought they said 11:35," I said, "but at this point, who knows."
He got up and looked at the lighted board at the departure gate, and then sat down again.
"11:35," he confirmed. "So...you live in Montreal. Do you speak French?"
I told him I did, but didn't consider myself fluent.
"C'est ma langue préferé, such a beautiful language to listen to and to speak!" he said, smiling, and so we switched and spoke in French. I asked him how many languages he spoke, and he named five or six. "It's a hobby," he said. "I go somewhere, learn the language, stay a while, and then move on. My favorite place is Portugal."
I nodded and smiled: "Much better than Montreal in the winter." He raised his eyebrows and smiled, and then reached over and pulled his computer out of his backpack: suddenly our conversation was over. "Merci," he said. "Enjoy your stay in Berlin." The last I saw of him, as I boarded the plane, he was engaged in an animated conversation at the desk with one of the flight attendants, pointing out something on a piece of paper.
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(to be continued)
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On this day, that bowl of cherries seems quite ironic, even though our morning was beautiful here.
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Desk with wallet, bike light, and dollars
In yesterday's post I was talking about Flickr and online communities for sharing art and photography. If any of you are on Instagram, I'm also experimenting with it and would be happy to connect with you -- you can find me here.
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Tabletop with peonies and a postcard. Pen and ink.
It feels good to be drawing again, after running around for several weeks and barely setting pen to paper. There's no need to look for, or set up, a beautiful arrangement of objects - interesting forms and juxtapositions are everywhere. I find it a good challenge to just draw what's on the tabletop at a particular moment and not fuss over it too much. What can be made of whatever simply is?
Wine bottle with plastic bag and computer mouse. Pen and ink.
I think it's more important to get one's fingers busy drawing (or writing, or playing music) and one's head concentrating and absorbed than to worry about making a beautiful, finished, accomplished piece of art. Working fast and often, filling up sketchbooks, studying and learning from one's efforts: this is what seems to pay the best rewards and keeps me, anyway, from getting paralyzed by self-doubt or freighting infrequent drawings with too many expectations. (I liked what Laura Murphy Frankstone wrote about this recently on her artblog, in a post called "The 48 crayons and me") And it's amazing how, over time, we actually do improve: we see better, we draw better, our fingers gain facility, we get a better idea of what we want to do, we can make sense out of where we've been, we don't get as rattled by our failures, we're freer and more able to experiment. The point is to plunge in, trust the process, and not worry too much about where or how, or especially about end results or comments from others.
It helps to have ways of seeing one's path, and to have some sense of community. Having gallery shows is one way, keeping a blog is another, and the internet affords us a lot of other opportunities as well. Over the past year or two I've regularly posted a lot of my work on Flickr, and followed a number of other artists and photographers who do the same. Unlike some other, busier social media platforms, our little corner of Flickr seems to be populated by people who use it as a way to collect and view their own body of work over time, and that of others. It's respectful, serious, and pretty quiet. I enjoy seeing the evolution of the work of other artists: drawings that turn into paintings, ideas in different media that grow and change, bodies of photographic work, people who work in several media at once, directions explored and directions abandoned. I learn a lot about my own path by observing what others are doing, and their perseverance encourages me.
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