Scratches on the Container of Art 🌧
Good morningtide, my pals.
It is the night before this newsletter makes its way through your night-shut windows, climbs up your sturdy tailor’s table, and nestles through needles, thread, and fabric scraps till it’s snugly settled in your inbox.
Enjoy.
Scratches on the Container of Art
I keep thinking about a Tumblr post (can’t find it anymore) about the nostalgia for a medium, like film or vinyl, cassettes, VHS, or CDs, after it passes out of use.
We romanticize film grain. The crackle of a record. We hunger for imperfections.
We need proof the art itself cannot be contained. We want to see a few scratches on the container.
One of my favorite movies is The Story of Robin Hood and His Merry Men (1952).
The film is enchanting because it’s limited to filmmaking tools of the 1950s.
You cannot see the definition of every leaf and horn and leg of venison and chest of gold coins.
So your imagination fills out the specifics.
Like a reader building a daydream in their head while reading a novel, you get to participate in the imagining.
Filmmakers can do this anytime: don’t show everything. You can make the aspect ratio boxier or compose a shot behind two characters talking. You can create a luscious atmosphere with sound. Voila!
The viewer begins to imagine how the world of the movie might exist beyond the edges of the frame.
Embracing the limitations of the container of art allows room for mystery and wonder.
The point is something I figured out when I first volunteered to read with kids in my son’s first-grade class […] you’re almost never there to help them learn. You’re there to be an adult that they can connect with, who can help a kid be seen—especially for the kids who are so often unseen, and the ones who might not have adults in their lives who make their own existence feel safe, much less special. Ideally, you can help them build the confidence they need to read the paragraph, or add up the numbers, or decipher the word problem, or write that personal bit of narrative. That they’re competent and smart and deserve to use their voice. That they’re important to someone. That they’re worthy. Because they all are. That’s why I show up.
—Antonia Malchik, On the Commons
Attention—deep, sustained, undeviating—is in itself an experience of a very high order.
—Roberto Gerhard
Humans in Connection with Place
“The story another visitor told me was that this sister and her friends had discovered the abbey by accident on a road trip back in college in the 70s and decided she never wanted to leave. I looked around at the landscape, a patchwork of human dwellings, animal pasture, scupltures, tended gardens, wilderness and a chapel. I could see why.
“[…] Benedict required his monastics to take another vow in addition to the regular vows of obedience and chastity — a vow of stability. This means that Benedictines are married not only to one another in their community life but also to the place where they are, to the land. The line between the two — the community and the land — is a blurry one. Benedictines are straining toward heaven but with their feet firmly rooted in grubby earth.”
—Anna Hatke, The Nun Run
I have been thinking about the line from Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet:
“Your time is now, your inside’s out, honey how you grew / and if we stick together who knows what we’ll do / it was always the plan to put the world in your hand.”
The generational difference in how we view place and reality. The way online-ness makes me feel like I have access to every place in the world, and nothing is big or small. The time it takes to walk anywhere around town, and how much time it would take to walk to the next town, let alone out of the state.
When your perception of scale begins with standing on the ground to walk to a place, this earth is unimaginably vast.
Awareness can be formed to expand in breadth. This education is important. But awareness also comes in depth; attention and longstanding presence in a single place, till you know the landscape and the hidden shapes of the community and all the details involved in forming the life of the place you’ve lived for fifty years.
Care for words and listen to them. Care for the people on each side of you. (Hugs are good.) Care for land.
All shall be well.
3 Things from This Week:
From Montana: this song ~ You Can Close Your Eyes (very cozy ft. a baby)
A teenage girl this week told me about worldbuilding in the universe of stories in her imagination. There were lava merfolk in a land of dragons and a futuristic alien-fairy tale version of Northwest Montana. It was glorious.
Quote: 🏹📜🌻
"If you want fresh ideas in your head, get some fresh mud on your boots."
— Maryrose Wood, The Unseen Guest