Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Birthday greetings from Anna. Looking forward to a year that is as light and lovely as a feather.

Agency of Material Objects

Agency is a quality associated primarily with humans:  we have intentionality and also the capacity to achieve our intentions. That is, we can act as agents in the world, changing our environment and ourselves.  

From Kerry Moore's sculpture

Recently we began to consider the possibility that objects may have a kind of agency--for example, religious icons, artworks, books, technology etc. And, as it turns out, there are entire academic treatises devoted to such topics from Descartes (and before) to Latour (and beyond).

There is as well the concept of "secondary agency," which exceeds human intentions for an object. So, too, in the realm of material culture, it may be that "human" and "nonhuman" are not easily distinguished from one another--and that humans have interwoven material and nonmaterial dimensions.

Boxes, it seems to me, in their very presence exhibit a kind of agency: acting upon our world in a way that feels separate from their usefulness to humans. They have an inner life (what previously inhabited them; what escaped them) and an outer presence (who possessed them).  In fact, they are part of the very structure of our being.  Boxes have a kind of magic that evokes a response.

These are very uninformed and ill-formed ramblings but perhaps they suggest a direction that could provide a larger framework, a container, for more fully considering the secret and mysterious life of boxes.

Curator of international boxes

Chinese tea box

The color of a woman's heart: ancient Korean wrapping cloth

Book box

Some Boxes I Have Known

My friend Anna has a fascination with boxes, too. (We have a lot in common, including our birthdays.)  In fact some of mine were given to me by her, including a matchbox gift which I have forwarded to another worthy recipient. Here is what she has to say about her random assortment gathered over the years.

This is the inspiration for my recent matchbox gifts. 

My brother made this one for me circa 1974.

This box was given to me by one of my first students at Emory.  inside are iitems from the redwood forest.

My husband gave this one to me for my birthday early on in our relationship.  He packed it in his backpack to give it to me on a camping trip.  Made by two artists in Buffalo, NY, the eyes and mouth move when you pull the drawer open.

This box is so strong it's almost like wood.  It is a box from my parents that continues to store Christmas ornaments.  Could be as early as circa 1949.

Inhabited Spaces

I've been ruminating on the houses that I have inhabited from my childhood until the present.  They are in their own way the lived spaces of boxes and containers, vessels for our lives.

I only have on hand photographs of a few of them. 

In my quiet early morning moments, I walk their dusty corridors, search their crowded closets, pace their time-worn floors. 

What part of me remains in each of them--and what part of them still abides in me?


They provide opportunities for reverie.

Hambidge

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.                                                                                                  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Art of the Box: Structure and Chance

The box, or cube, figures prominently in art of the last century--and perhaps throughout all time.  In a recent trip to NYC, I saw an assortment of boxes as buildings and windows, their shape perhaps more evident in contrast to the sparkling snow that provided the backdrop. 

In fact, a city is essentially boxes stacked on top of one another or in close proximity.

Niles Spencer, City Walls

Charles Sheeler
Bucks County Barn

Visiting MOMA, I experienced two art exhibitions, also in close proximity. First, there was "American Modern, Hopper to O'Keefe," where both the rural and urban aesthetic often contained box-like structures.  

Edward Hopper, Box Factory, Gloucester (1928)

My friend and I also discovered: "There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33." Its title comes from a letter Cage wrote in 1954 about the music of silence. In this era, artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, and Barnett Newman explored contextual limits. They moved within and outside of the box.

John Cage sought otherworldliness through Buddhism, chess, long walks, and composing music of chance and silence. It was just by chance that we encountered his work as the exhibition was scheduled to close the preceding day.

Jean (Hans) Arp
Collage with Squares
Arranged according to the Laws of Chance,

Music Boxes

My great-grandfather Alexander M. Barbee was an entrepreneur, a terrapin farmer, and a collector of music boxes, many of which were custom made for him.  

I have a couple in my home. My mother and aunt have many more of them.

This one plays a disk, "Rosemarie I love you, I'm always thinking of  you."

Boxes, it seems, were fascinating to him as well.

The music of the box provided a creative outlet for him. He had an entire room in a Victorian House at Isle of Hope dedicated to these musical items, including the bed, a bird cage, pictures, hat racks, statues--you name it.  They were containers for music of all kinds.

I just came across a blog article ("Weird Universe") about my great grandfather and his pet terrapin, Toby, on the internet.  He was also written about by Joseph Mitchell for the New Yorker and his book, "Up in the Old Hotel." Rooms, homes, and hotels are kinds of boxes as well.

And perhaps for boxes as well as for emotional experiences, "the best way out is always through" (Robert Frost).

Something Deeply Hidden

"Something deeply hidden had to be behind things": these words, attributed to Einstein, can be traced to his encounter with a compass at age 5.  There were hidden forces in the universe. There are hidden forces within ourselves as well.

This blog, taken overall, explores those hidden forces in the universe of being--what is beneath the experience of our lives, our travel, our emotions?

For now, I'm led to explore the idea of boxes or containers or vessels.  This thought came to me with the New Year, the thought of unlocking what felt like the boxed-in, compressed turmoil of life--all jam-packed together seemingly without order.  With the opening of a little space, what did these tangled items have in common, did they fit together, what did they reveal?


Since then, I've been noting such visible containers or boxes in my life.  What do they hold?  Do they all tell a story--whether of collected moments or of holidays survived.

This one is called a poem box. Some colleagues gave it to me many years ago. I'm now thinking of actually placing favorite poems in it, a thought that had not occurred to me until I began to pursue this line of thinking. There are so many poems encircling me.

And here's another: College Collage.

It's a file box created during those years--and it still holds file cards from old term papers about topics I didn't even know (anymore) that I once studied.

What do these boxes that occupy my space say about my life, about the inner and outer places, about what is hidden behind and within things?

Misty Mornings: Resolution 2014

"Winds in the east, mist coming in, like something is brewing--about to begin.
Can't put me finger on what lies in store, but I feel what's to happen all happened before."

 --Bert, Mary Poppins

Some thoughts for the coming year, punctuated by my resolution for 2014:

I woke up one morning in late December and thought about a kind of "unlocking" that needs to happen in my life, within myself.  The picture that came to mind was of a box or container within.  Here is one version of what I imagined into being.

I also thought about Mary Poppins satchel, where all sorts of magical items get stored and released into the world.  My friend Anna helped me think of numerous other words for unlocking, words that connected to what I was thinking and wanting for myself: unloose, undo, unfasten, set free, allow to flow or to come forth, to free from being fixed.  All of these qualities I am seeking for myself.

So the action that I have in mind for the coming year is one of unlocking, allowing to flow or to come forth. A kind of magic that needs to happen.

At the same time, I wished for a resolution that more fully described a state of being rather than an action; an action suggests something that I must do. And part of what I want to experience is being rather than doing.

All of these thoughts came to me in the hazy mists of dozing/waking in the early morning.  Given my schedule and other pressing matters, I have not had time or inclination over the past year to allow my mind to wander or to drift.  And it struck me that the unhurried and unfocused morning thoughts are where I want to dwell. That state is neither here not there; it's betwixt and between, neither waking nor sleeping.

I'm seeking that misty state of being, the one promising that something is brewing, about to begin--and that what's to happen has happened before.

Thus, that liminal state of being, "occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a threshold" has selected me for my New Year's Resolution 2014. 

Liminal: of or relating to a sensory threshold; barely perceptible; in-between.

"Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame."
--W.B. Yeats

Here's to Us!

Family and festivities

Beyond 2013

My blog, like other introspective parts of my life, has been neglected for the past year.  Perhaps its time of robustness has reached a natural conclustion.  Or perhaps, for just a little while longer, I can still post a few insights here--and certainly my New Year's thoughts.

2013 was full of very few peaks and many, many valleys.  In fact those valleys seemed often like troughs or gullies. There were sadnesses, losses, disappointments, and sorrows. And a few meaningful journeys of the interior and exterior domain.  And, all in all, there was too much work (for me!).

The writer and adventurer Isak Dinesen once wrote that "all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them."

I've been separated--from my own story, from myself.  This is due to circumstances, decisions, conditions, and fate.  I'm thinking of ways to re-kindle those connections within myself, as this year with all its gulleys also found depths of being.

******

The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,

everything it lost and found again, and everyone

it loved, the heart cannot forget. 

--Joyce Sutphen,

What the Heart Cannot Forget