I was sitting in the shade of a gnarly old magnolia tree in the courtyard of the nearby coffee shop which was inside an old white farmhouse built in the early twentieth century. The temperature had dropped a few degrees below the normal Florida summer Dante’s Inferno level when a bank of clouds moved in and a breeze picked up. I was scanning a page of sloppily penciled words in a bright orange notebook I purchased at an office supply store in Aix-en-Provence years ago. On the back cover, the store’s name was embossed in small metallic gold letters above the hope-filled trademark “Ecrire le monde, savourer la vie” which means “Write the world, savor life.”
When it happened, I was savoring the following sentence at the top of the page: We need a narrative sufficient to make sense of our lives by recognizing the continuity between our past and present and our intended future. Just as I finished the sentence, a tiny dark insect, barely 2 millimeters long and thin as a straight pin, landed at the top right corner of the page and began the narrative of its own rapid journey to the bottom.
The first word it crossed was ARTISTS in capital letters. Obviously the heading for a list. Below this was BULL—a reference to Charles Livingston Bull, the famous naturalist and illustrator. The next name was NICOLAS DE STAËL, a French painter of Russian background known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. For example:
The next name was GOWIN, which could only mean the American photographer Emmett Gowin from Danville, Virginia, who first gained attention in the 1970s for his intimate portraits of his wife Edith and her family. It seemed appropriate that the tiny insect should walk over his name in particular, since one of Gowin’s recent books is a giant collection of stunning photographs of the exquisitely colorful moths of Central and South America. Next came MAKOTO FUJIMURA, the American painter from whom I learned about the ancient Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, the art of taking broken porcelain and by the golden material used for repair, making the porcelain something even more beautiful than before. This powerful image is then applied more widely to human lives and to the life of the whole world.
Below FUJIMURA, the rich exquisite rich colors of the world were signified as the six-legged hiker crossed the words VAN GOGH, calling to mind the amazing multimedia show postponed by the pandemic but well worth the wait when my wife and I saw it last year. Next my insect companion demonstrated its peripatetic resolve by trampling the word FOCUS before skirting just around the letter R in the word PURPOSE. It then enjoyed an inch and a half of blank page before arriving at the scribbly line ART/NATURE/VIRTUES/WISDOM, from which an arrow had been drawn to MUSIC from the word ART. It did not pause to study the words “natural history” which were framed by a sloppy rectangle connected by a line to “Science?” which was just above LIFE-STORY.
By this point the adventurer was nearing the bottom of the page and I regretted that I hadn’t packed the Hastings Triplex magnifier I sometimes carry in my satchel. There was only one field of graphite marks to pass over now. “Can’t be everything to everybody” seemed appropriate as the tiny insect reached the bottom of the page and flew away, never to be seen by me—or perhaps any other human being—again.
https://oradell.bccls.org/bull-collection.html
https://www.facebook.com/makotofujimuraart/
Love this Del!