How one
thing leads to another:
I was under some dark theft star one night last
week, very unusual here: in the evening, a pickpocket, sneaking up behind
me in the dark, tried to get into my purse; the following morning, I
discovered that during the night some other knave had nicked the ceramic
flower box that was home to our kitchen window morning glories, leaving all
their poor naked roots dangling helplessly in the wind. The pickpocket I grabbed
and told off (in my best Anglo-Saxon) & got on with things if a little
shaky with adrenaline. But the flowerbox broke my heart. Our neighbor &
housekeeper, Wu Fang, wrote 素质差 (su4 zhi4 cha4) on my phone which my (life-saving) Pleco
translation app translated as “So ignorant! So uneducated!”
All summer the morning glories had brought
pleasure to our neighbors who use the narrow walled-in lane behind our block of
rowhouses, for washing vegetables in their outdoor kitchen sinks & hanging
out laundry on the bamboo poles overhead. I’d look up from my own (indoor) sink
to see someone paused in their path to gaze for a moment at the unexpected
beauty of the vines. Once, an elderly man who had once lived in America as a
chemistry professor, spoke to me approvingly as I watered the flowerbox: “I
think you are very comfortable in China.” (Not.)
So morning glories gone but determined not to be
robbed of beauty outside my kitchen window, I plotted my own theft…
And stoled the idea from the artist Jim Hodges of
a giant “curtain” made up of dissected, flattened artificial flowers. Hodges’ curtain at SFMoMA seemed like an insane task of labor even before I tried my
hand at it, & now that I am trying my hand at it, I'm exponentially in awe.
But the really interesting part is dissecting the artificial flowers: like
botanical drawing in reverse. I’ve always been a snob about fake flowers, thinking
them cheap & trashy but now that I see the amount of hand labor that goes
in, the number of specialized plastic widgets that create the shape of the
blossoms, the various texturing of the leaves, stamens, berries, the hand-dying
of the blossoms, it's an amazing world! Who knew! I feel like I’ve stumbled
into a secret sphere of the universe.
I once heard the poet Billie Collins say that the
true subject of poetry is death. By which I think he meant impermanence. He compared
a fresh flower to an artificial one, a fresh flower having a power of beauty
that an artificial flower does not precisely because we know that the fresh
flowers beauty is fleeting, something we must see it in the moment or we will
miss it. But now, dissecting the fake flowers, and seeing the attention with
which someone (who?! even Google keeps that secret pretty well) has studied
nature & tried to capture it, to fix its moment of glory in time, there's
this vast beauty of life, of the creative spirit in that too.
You can tell I'm a little enraptured.
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| Drawer 5.7 from the bottom up: 1. random bits of plastic tying string collected on the street 2. left over scraps of painted cardboard 3. bits of artificial flowers picked up from the stairwell of my studio building where numerous wedding photographers ply their trade 4. a ball of ubiquitous pink plastic tying string protected by a blue styrofoam pear protector photo credit: Bruno David |
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