[while washing the dishes]
the sparrow came to see the sewing scissors
This is a Hokusai woodcut showing a sparrow in flight near a pair of thread scissors. The scissors are decorated with what looks like a bell and a red tassel; the thin threads of the tassel move beautifully on the paper. I love the care in Hokusai’s depiction of the implement. You can see the place the blade was sharpened. The dimensionality of the object is rendered precisely: the darker shadows follow its geometry. How well-made it looks, with its flat-edged handle. The metal scissors (cool and heavy in the palm) make a contrast to the light slipperiness of the tassel’s threads. Such an ordinary tool, used for the smallest of tasks—snipping thread. And an ordinary bird, too, the sparrow: a pest some places, a city bird, certainly easy to overlook as a hundred of them make their noisy cheeping in a hedge. The thick-thin lines that show the observation of how feathers move and how they look in relation to one another. Like Dürer, Hokusai attends to the fineness and particularity of everyday things. This attention is an expert attention in reach of anyone. It takes work, patience, but we, too, can learn to see how things are.
The right tools for the job means taking time to see how, exactly, one thing interacts with another. The Hokusai print leads me to look for other prints with scissors—and there are several available in the museum collections I page through. Here are scissors for flower arranging (another version in this print) held in a patchwork pouch. All of the marks on this print were made in reverse on the block: even those careful characters that spell out the words of the poem. To make a print like this is expert labor, learned through repetition over time. You have to stay with the tools long enough to know what they will do. Expertise can be about a close relation, over a sustained period, with the material and living world; not a terminus, but a path made by walking. And maybe expertise is also the discernment that tells one, at some point in one’s life, that there is not time for everything, but there is time for what matters—and looking, right here, at our lives and their elements: that does matter.
The image of the floral shears and this one, of a sewing box and a piece of clothing—small thread snips and spool of thread in the foreground—belong to a genre of pictures called surimono (more) often commissioned as private publications by groups of poets for poetry contests and to mark other occasions. The poems were printed alongside the images. Like knowing how to use a tool and like making a woodblock, making a poem takes time and attention to exactly what is around you. To see a likeness between unlike things, and to permit that likeness to transform the world—as in the attention the printmaker has paid to the shape of the bird and the shape of the scissors.
As a reader and a viewer, I am rarely moved by a massive vista or an abstracted emotion. I am moved by the sharpness with which the writer or artist has seen, and can portray, the texture and materials of everyday life, down to the most banal (charming, beautiful, irritating) details, and by the way the congruence of that attention shows me what I’ve missed.
In late March I came across a project by rob mclennan (if you don’t know rob’s work, his blog is a treasure trove of decades of small-press poetry, and he recently began posting on Substack as well). Above/ground press is making Festschriften, celebratory and loving books by multiple authors about the work and lives of the poets the press has published. Here is a link to one of the most recent examples. These are being made without the knowledge of the poets—who find out only when the books show up in the mail. What a gift. How many people’s poems have I loved, have you loved? I remember a teacher telling us when I was in university that if we were moved by a poet’s work we should write to them, without waiting. What better use could there be of our time and talents than to make books for one another, of one another’s, loving one another through that work?
In a way these books of mclennan’s—and much small-press production; in a month or two I’ll write about some books recently acquired from essence press—remind me of the prints commissioned by poetry societies in 18th-19th century Japan. They are beautiful objects that help us see one thing very clearly, made by the expert work of people who have spent a long time with the making and the seeing. The making takes the time it takes. And what results doesn’t have to be the biggest, most widely disseminated, most public (like a frog). It can be here, between us, the work of meaning that is the work of literature (or art) that is the work of a shared, human life.
Thank you for reading—and being—here.