making a living
at the scale and pace of everyday life
Hello everyone—it’s the end of April and this is your April installment of Bewilderment. Some beauty this month: the Emory students’ statement in response to the university’s accusations around “outside agitators” in the students’ encampment. Shannon Mattern’s essay “Fugitive Libraries”, at Places. Katherine Wirick’s No One Is Safe. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ exultant poem “Spring” with its perfect observations of weeds and pear leaves and thrushes’ eggs.
Looking ahead, if you’ll be in Dublin in June, this should be a good show.
Let’s make a picture we would like to have on the wall of our house. Let’s make that wall itself. Let’s figure out how to cut lumber, let’s figure out plaster and limewash and paint. Let’s find a chair in a Dumpster and sew a patchwork cover for the seat. Let’s sit on that chair in the room we made, by the window. Let’s sew a curtain for the window. Let’s figure out how to warp a loom. Let’s spin some thread. Let’s keep a garden: let’s plant the things we like to eat in there (tomatoes, lettuces and radicchio, eggplants, zucchini, fruit trees and -bushes). Let’s grow some indigo from seed, ferment it, make it into dye.
Let’s make a little pile of things we don’t need anymore and put them by the front gate/the curb/the driveway in the alley for someone else to grab. Let’s make a loaf of bread: some flour, some water, some yeast, some salt. Let’s iron the tablecloth someone found in a thrift shop. Let’s write a book. Let’s print that book on the photocopier after work, let’s fold the pages. Let’s glue them into a spine we’ve cut from paper we like. Let’s make a couple more copies; let’s send them to our friends. Let’s shovel snow from off the steps, and then the walk, and then the neighbor’s snow. Let’s make a drawing in a notebook that we made. Let’s make a few more blank notebooks like that to give away. Let’s go outside. Let’s take a walk.
Let’s steal two stems of lilac—two is enough—from a neighborhood tree weighed down with blooms. Let’s put them in a jar taken out of the recycling bin when we get home. Let’s play a song while we do the dishes, let’s cut an old potato into a stamp and stamp it on some sheets. Let’s fold those, make them into cards. Let’s send those cards out to our friends as well. Let’s paint the floor. Let’s wash the windows. Let’s remember that a simple song is every bit a song.
Let’s hang the bedsheets out to dry. Let’s make the bed. Let’s make a quilt. Let’s have a clothing swap with friends. Let’s bake a cake from whatever’s left in the cupboard. Let’s bike down to the library, let’s take a dip in the lake in the afternoon. Let’s make another meal, light candles, set the places out. Let’s write a letter, let’s say hello to the woman at the post office counter who recognizes us. Let’s write a poem, let’s make another book. Let’s take a photo of the sky and text it to a friend. Let’s make another picture for the other wall, let’s go to bed. Let’s do the work that makes our lives our own. Let’s do it at a pace that lets us live together—enough for each of us to do, no more than what we need. Let’s make the beauty that we want to see. And every tomorrow we get, let’s all together do all of it again.
All year long I was writing about looking and walking, making and being. And I’ve been thinking about the art I like most, which is the kind we make for ourselves, as an enactment of the beauty we want in our lives, that says our lives. And I’ve been reading books and writing books, talking with people inside and outside of classrooms about making books and art, and about living and walking, looking and making, being and how to be together. I’ve been thinking about the pace of that, the scale of that: how little I feel I need when I am making the life that really makes me feel whole, together with others. Usually I can use what’s around me, and I can occupy my entire day with the imaginative work of house-making and art-making, teaching, walking, looking. It’s a pace of sufficiency. Making. Being. To the scale of our lives.
That’s what we do. Or what we are supposed to do, I think. Make things. Be together.
No surprise, that’s what I want to do, too. It’s really all I want to do. Make things to a human scale. Be with you. So: no waiting. Not all the details are clear yet, but here’s what I know:
The next thing will be called Abundant Number, and will be a series of books, or booklets, really, full of slow things—broadly understood to mean things that are slow to read or write or make, slow moving, durational, full of white space, packed with lines of closely set text, going at the speed of a pedestrian, belated, late, out-of-date, among many other possibilities—will have a first issue this summer. In AN.1, you will find a couple of walks from me as well as an album review by Matthew Houston, chapters from a novel by Steve Himmer, and a few other pieces of writing TBD.
Inside each issue of Abundant Number, there will be a postcard that is also a kind of text message. You can send it to a friend, a very delayed SMS. You’ll just need a stamp. AN.1 will contain a postcard with images and text by Andrea Blancas Beltran.
Some answers, many surely not satisfactory, to your practical questions:
Will Abundant Number be in print or online? Abundant Number will be in print only. Some pieces you’ll see there have appeared on Bewilderment (and will disappear from the internet). Others will be new and in print only.
Where will I be able to find information about Abundant Number? Here, at first, and soon also on my website.
Will I be able to order a copy of an issue of Abundant Number? You will. When? I hope the first issue will be ready in late summer.
I work in a bookshop or other retail establishment. Will we be able to carry Abundant Number? I think so. Please fill out this form if you’d like to be on my list of people to contact when that becomes possible.
How much will AN cost? Not much, including worldwide shipping.
How often will AN appear? I hope twice a year. It may be more often. It may be less often. It probably won’t be entirely regular.
Will I be able to subscribe? Yes, probably for something like four subsequent books/booklets at a time. If you want to register interest, you can drop your details into this form.
I make slow things, or I want to review a book, album, or other object/event that is more than one year old. Can I send you something? Not yet, but eventually. I hope to open for unsolicited work a couple of times a year. One exception: if you and I have a previously existing writerly relationship—inside of the classroom or out, including via significant exchanges online—you can feel free to get in touch directly.
Will published work pay? No: I’ll be able to send you copies of AN, but nothing your landlord will accept as rent payment.
More news (about the new location for Bewilderment, about Abundant Number, about the things of the world) and more to read here in late May. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re safe and happy, that you’re free and able to do what makes you more alive. I hope that the occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing genocide there, will end. I hope that people everywhere will have safety, and comfort, and companionship, and freedom from fear.
See you in a month. Thanks for reading!
AN sounds like just what I need in my life. Delight! Thank you for all your goodness!