Odd Mood
What a very odd mood I am in. It's almost.....hypnagogic. Just colder, maybe, and kinder.
I was just quite suddenly overwhelmed by the wonderful, tiny details of the world. The things that aren't manufactured- the sort of details that are accidental, organic, lovely, and sometimes just old. What is it with things that are old? There's a fantastic mystery to them. I was looking at this old steamer trunk of my great-grandmother's- all splendid blue-and-silver-patterned paper and dusty, greying velvet. All the fussy details and little, beautiful mistakes in it.... the lumps, the warps, the peeling away of tiny ribbons of paper. It's a very proud thing, but defeated-looking, worn out, somehow benevolent and resigned. It just exists, all its own. How to explain it? I guess.. I was in Wal-mart earlier (corporate entity eek) and NOTHING there has the sort of preciousness that I find beautiful. It's all gloss and freshness and prepackaging. That sort of sleek structure doesn't do anything for me. It's the mistakes, the history, the thought and passion that mean anything anymore. I suppose that's why I try to make art. There's so much history, so much preciousness and carelessness and aberration that it's unmistakeably unique. It's transient, in a world in which far too much is reproducible. I feel like I need to write this down, in pen, on paper, so I can make a note that's something more than a complicated sequence of 0's and 1's. I can't find the beauty in it- perhaps the efficiency, and the universiality, but I can't find the history, the touch, the contact. I need that- it's what makes anything precious, historical, timeless. Its very frozenness is what gives it beauty. It can't unexist with a ctrl-z or a delete. It's singing aloud versus watching television. So much more personal, more captured, more intentional. That's why I love small moments, little things. I wish I could remember to notice them more often. I wish I could hold my mind here forever. I miss this place, when I leave it. I want to exist in it always, connecting words and lines and random noises, threads in my environment and my mind.
I think of my old home in Michigan; Foxboro, a place that changed constantly with seasons and new growth and exploration. I lived there between the ages of seven and twelve, roughly. It was pure magic- fifteen acres of pure magic, and a house nestled back into the woods. Every log hid a orange-scarlet salamander or glossy pillbugs, every tree had its gnarled branches, perfect for climbing. Behind the marshes, birch and ash grew in strange, column-groves, and even past them, fields and blackberry brambles came in tangles and surges from the forest. During the summer, the little umbrella-like plants that grew profusely on the forest floor would grow fruits that tasted a bit like bananas and cucumbers and apples. The horses wouldn't eat them, but we would, me and my sister, and spit out the tiny seeds. The horses didn't mind terribly, we'd let them graze, and they'd never go farther than a hundred yards even if we weren't paying particular attention. We'd just bring books into the woods and the fields, sometimes perched on a tree branch, sometimes lying on our horse's bare backs, sometimes curled in the sun-warmed grass. Just down the road from our house, a runoff pipe had made a deep gully, exposing roots, plants, loose embankments, fungi, and small hollowed-out areas like caves and eaves. Next door, for a while, there was a mountain of dirt from excavation that made a perfect conquest and play-fort, all the water-trickles flows of lava or mountain rivers in our little kid's minds. Seasons were dramatic there. Autumn was an inferno of brilliant colors. In the spring, the dogwoods would bloom, surrounding the house in flurries of pink and white, and in the winter, the branches were frosted in perfect, crisp lines. Snow would build up, courtesy of snowplow, in enormous mountains that could house snow caves large enough to stand up in, walk around in, until the snowplow came by again and caved them in. Riding the horses in this charmed half-world was magic- the snow was often chest-deep on our little ponies, but they forged through it, icicles growing on their shaggy sides and muzzles. Winter brought snowstorms, spring, torrential rains, summer, tornadoes and massive, earthshaking thunderstorms. Weather was never a side-note there. It was a fragile, magical little microcosm, for a few years. I would wake up before the sun rose, and finish my schoolwork (a beauty of homeschooling) before eight or ten in the morning. Then, I was free to do whatever I pleased, which usually meant going outdoors, or sometimes reading, and often both. It was wonderful, and then the storm came through, and took the trees, and it wasn't really the same, so we left. It was the land that kept us there, really, and when that was gone it was no longer worth it to stay there. The place I live now isn't so bad, really. It's a beautiful part of the country- there are mountains! - but it doesn't have the same sort of unbelievable magic that Foxboro had. It was that old-world magic that doesn't exist so very often any more. That's the sort of magic that DOES exist- memories and ties and growing things and old things. Every place has its own magic, some places just have more than others. It's memories that give places that quality. When it's nature, it's the memory of living things, and of the earth. When it's cities, it's the memory of people, decades of them on the streets. That's a different kind of nature, and a different kind of magic. But this place- near-suburbia, near-new... there's none of that memory here yet. It's hard enough to find in such a young place as America, but in suburbia, it's nonexistent. You have to look for it in the oddest places- shops and streetcorners and alleys farther from the developments and the placid middle-class american-idol-watching household. It's there, but just. It has to be found. I'm glad that I walk so many places, otherwise I'd never see any magic here. It's sort of harder to see from a car.
Oddly enough, thinking about all this, I am seized upon by an impulse to take a road trip. Not a planned one- more like one of those where you take a bit of money, sleep in your car, and live on a prayer and a roadmap. I want to see old things, and not need to take pictures. I want to see the unremarkable and the undiscovered and the unchanging and the constantly changeable. I want to see places and people and take everything in, soak it in like sunlight and the cold. It's wanderlust, I suppose. I've been stationary for too long, with too few tastes of wonder for my liking. I can't settle, but then, I never have been able to.
Like I said, an odd mood.
I was just quite suddenly overwhelmed by the wonderful, tiny details of the world. The things that aren't manufactured- the sort of details that are accidental, organic, lovely, and sometimes just old. What is it with things that are old? There's a fantastic mystery to them. I was looking at this old steamer trunk of my great-grandmother's- all splendid blue-and-silver-patterned paper and dusty, greying velvet. All the fussy details and little, beautiful mistakes in it.... the lumps, the warps, the peeling away of tiny ribbons of paper. It's a very proud thing, but defeated-looking, worn out, somehow benevolent and resigned. It just exists, all its own. How to explain it? I guess.. I was in Wal-mart earlier (corporate entity eek) and NOTHING there has the sort of preciousness that I find beautiful. It's all gloss and freshness and prepackaging. That sort of sleek structure doesn't do anything for me. It's the mistakes, the history, the thought and passion that mean anything anymore. I suppose that's why I try to make art. There's so much history, so much preciousness and carelessness and aberration that it's unmistakeably unique. It's transient, in a world in which far too much is reproducible. I feel like I need to write this down, in pen, on paper, so I can make a note that's something more than a complicated sequence of 0's and 1's. I can't find the beauty in it- perhaps the efficiency, and the universiality, but I can't find the history, the touch, the contact. I need that- it's what makes anything precious, historical, timeless. Its very frozenness is what gives it beauty. It can't unexist with a ctrl-z or a delete. It's singing aloud versus watching television. So much more personal, more captured, more intentional. That's why I love small moments, little things. I wish I could remember to notice them more often. I wish I could hold my mind here forever. I miss this place, when I leave it. I want to exist in it always, connecting words and lines and random noises, threads in my environment and my mind.
I think of my old home in Michigan; Foxboro, a place that changed constantly with seasons and new growth and exploration. I lived there between the ages of seven and twelve, roughly. It was pure magic- fifteen acres of pure magic, and a house nestled back into the woods. Every log hid a orange-scarlet salamander or glossy pillbugs, every tree had its gnarled branches, perfect for climbing. Behind the marshes, birch and ash grew in strange, column-groves, and even past them, fields and blackberry brambles came in tangles and surges from the forest. During the summer, the little umbrella-like plants that grew profusely on the forest floor would grow fruits that tasted a bit like bananas and cucumbers and apples. The horses wouldn't eat them, but we would, me and my sister, and spit out the tiny seeds. The horses didn't mind terribly, we'd let them graze, and they'd never go farther than a hundred yards even if we weren't paying particular attention. We'd just bring books into the woods and the fields, sometimes perched on a tree branch, sometimes lying on our horse's bare backs, sometimes curled in the sun-warmed grass. Just down the road from our house, a runoff pipe had made a deep gully, exposing roots, plants, loose embankments, fungi, and small hollowed-out areas like caves and eaves. Next door, for a while, there was a mountain of dirt from excavation that made a perfect conquest and play-fort, all the water-trickles flows of lava or mountain rivers in our little kid's minds. Seasons were dramatic there. Autumn was an inferno of brilliant colors. In the spring, the dogwoods would bloom, surrounding the house in flurries of pink and white, and in the winter, the branches were frosted in perfect, crisp lines. Snow would build up, courtesy of snowplow, in enormous mountains that could house snow caves large enough to stand up in, walk around in, until the snowplow came by again and caved them in. Riding the horses in this charmed half-world was magic- the snow was often chest-deep on our little ponies, but they forged through it, icicles growing on their shaggy sides and muzzles. Winter brought snowstorms, spring, torrential rains, summer, tornadoes and massive, earthshaking thunderstorms. Weather was never a side-note there. It was a fragile, magical little microcosm, for a few years. I would wake up before the sun rose, and finish my schoolwork (a beauty of homeschooling) before eight or ten in the morning. Then, I was free to do whatever I pleased, which usually meant going outdoors, or sometimes reading, and often both. It was wonderful, and then the storm came through, and took the trees, and it wasn't really the same, so we left. It was the land that kept us there, really, and when that was gone it was no longer worth it to stay there. The place I live now isn't so bad, really. It's a beautiful part of the country- there are mountains! - but it doesn't have the same sort of unbelievable magic that Foxboro had. It was that old-world magic that doesn't exist so very often any more. That's the sort of magic that DOES exist- memories and ties and growing things and old things. Every place has its own magic, some places just have more than others. It's memories that give places that quality. When it's nature, it's the memory of living things, and of the earth. When it's cities, it's the memory of people, decades of them on the streets. That's a different kind of nature, and a different kind of magic. But this place- near-suburbia, near-new... there's none of that memory here yet. It's hard enough to find in such a young place as America, but in suburbia, it's nonexistent. You have to look for it in the oddest places- shops and streetcorners and alleys farther from the developments and the placid middle-class american-idol-watching household. It's there, but just. It has to be found. I'm glad that I walk so many places, otherwise I'd never see any magic here. It's sort of harder to see from a car.
Oddly enough, thinking about all this, I am seized upon by an impulse to take a road trip. Not a planned one- more like one of those where you take a bit of money, sleep in your car, and live on a prayer and a roadmap. I want to see old things, and not need to take pictures. I want to see the unremarkable and the undiscovered and the unchanging and the constantly changeable. I want to see places and people and take everything in, soak it in like sunlight and the cold. It's wanderlust, I suppose. I've been stationary for too long, with too few tastes of wonder for my liking. I can't settle, but then, I never have been able to.
Like I said, an odd mood.