One evening last summer I sat on the porch between my daughters, reading. Sitting still so my friend Stacy could paint our portrait. I was reading over and over Frank Bidart’s poem, “Advice to the Players.” The line, Without clarity about what we make, and the choices that underlie it, the need to make is a curse, a misfortune. The line, My parents saw corrosively.
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This past winter my daughter and I made a three-foot-tall papier-mâché sculpture of a woman weaving at a loom. It started as a school assignment; her fourth-grade teacher asked for family participation, and I obeyed.
We were to build a replica of an artifact from an ancient Mayan civilization. Iris chose a figurine from Jaina island—a clay sculpture, probably made as a burial tribute. The woman is seated, weaving on a backstrap loom. At the head of the loom, watching her, a small bird.
Iris told me something about this bird: it always shows up in the weaver figurines, and nobody knows exactly why. Maybe it’s because birds weave too, turning grasses and twigs (maybe even a woman’s discarded scraps of string) into nests.
Maybe it’s about watching creation.
First, we opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink and pulled out the recycling bin. In the corner of the kitchen, we heaped all the materials we might use.
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When I’m cooking dinner for myself and my family, I’m not just myself, cooking. There’s no way to do it without sensing my mother, cooking, telling herself it was the right and best thing she could do as a mother. My grandmother, cooking, knowing it was her duty, considering no other options. My great grandmother, I imagine, cooking like breathing. Cooking dinner without the sense that anyone else in the house ever would or could.
When you go to cook dinner, you hope someone—you, or someone else—has cooked the night before, and before that. You hope for their leftovers, their scraps.
Half an onion in the crisper. Some cut up vegetables to throw into a soup. A cold cut of meat to slice thinly and lay on top of noodles.
It’s nice if there’s a whole, unopened bunch of green onions, its rubber band and cellophane still in place. But it’s better if there’s one scallion afloat in the crisper drawer, some of its leaves yellowed but its white layers and inches of green still crisp. It’s better because it’s no more than you need. If you need more than there is, it’s best to change your plan so the scallion becomes precisely right.
Trim, rinse, slice. It’s another chef’s remnant, and you’ve used it. Completed what yesterday’s cook started. Accepted the gift with gratitude.
If yesterday’s chef was you, all the better.
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Some kinds of work repeat and repeat. But the jobs that make the big bucks and honor are presumably non-repetitive. CEOs, for example. The decision-makers on boards, the inventors of gadgets and solvers of technical problems. I’ve been brought to understand that’s where success lies. In doing work no other person would do quite the same way.
The other kinds of work I’ve done, I understand, are less: employ a few principles to maneuver a machine over and over. Count bolts in a warehouse. Unjam the copy machine. Cook dinner.
Artists, too—including writers—are supposed to be doing something new and all on our own. Creating. When I think about that, I stop writing.
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As I write this on an island the white-throated sparrow is calling its long, three-note song, as it has on every out-breath all week. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote about this little bird’s song, repeat, repeat, revise revise revise.
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As with cooking, when I write, I hope someone else has been in the kitchen recently. I hope the kitchen hasn’t been empty for long.
“Recently” has a longer chronological reach when it comes to art. In fact, replace “recently” with “ever before.” Choose one thing to imitate—the sculpture my daughter chose from a book at school. A woman weaving on a backstrap loom—a woman making something.
We sculpted her differently than the Maya maker did. We made her out of a cardboard box that a fan came in; a lot of toilet paper tubes and wrapping paper tubes; a pasta box; a cereal box; crumpled paper; a paste made of flour and water; an oatmeal box; strips of newsprint; padded mailing envelopes; two balloons; grey paint bought at the art store.
Our sculpture was not an exact replica, naturally. But it had the same shape—a woman, cross-legged, straight-backed. Her arms at work. Her face calm, concentrating. Her work stretched in front of her. A round-bodied bird, perched on the bar of her loom, watching. The bird’s tail a little fan.
Who made the sculpture Iris found in her book? Would that person, seeing our weaver, recognize the shape? Was that sculptor imitating yet an earlier artist? Or is the clay figure only a copy of the woman herself, the woman weaving, the original mover, the one who invented her own form?
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Nobody is free from repetition. Even caring for the body is over and over the same. Drawing a comb or one’s fingers through one’s hair. Bringing water—with hands or with cloth—to one’s face. And soap. Avoiding the eyes. Reaching the spaces between nose and mouth, between nose and cheeks.
This is as passed down, as elemental, as crimping the edge of a pie crust with thumb and fingers—a job I watched my grandmother do, my mother, my aunts. A movement I make, too, feeling, while I do it, that my hands aren’t mine at all but all of those women’s.
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Looking at the weaver we’ve just finished, there is pleasure and a kind of recognition of a being. I find myself staring at her painted papier-mâché face the way I stared at my own newborn children’s faces.
She has a sturdiness of posture that is familiar. When we finish painting the final layer, the feeling of stepping back and looking is so distinctive. Did the Maya sculptor experience these same contours of sensation?
If a moment of feeling is the flash of a flare between a billion neurons in a long, one-of-a-kind serpent of brain action, maybe the Maya maker, Iris, and I carried, for a moment, a few identical curves. It’s a kind of alikeness. Maybe it’s not even in the brain.
Maybe it’s the shape the maker’s hand takes after the work of smoothing a certain curve of face; the angle at which the maker is drawn to look at the work.
Maybe the comb through the hair is just as sublime.
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Stacy paints us for an hour, and then she says, I’m getting tired. I’ll scrape down and try again tomorrow.
What she means is, she takes a triangular metal putty knife to that hour’s work, removing almost all of the paint she’s laid down. This takes away the finer details of what she’s done, but it leaves on the paper an outline of the shapes—a container for the memories of the finer strokes.
The next evening, she’ll start again, with that shadow as a guide. The parts she felt she did well the first time, she’ll be able to repeat easily. Where she was unsatisfied on the first try, she can paint differently now.
Repeat, repeat. Revise, revise, revise.
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Many nights, dinner may be the same. Twice a week in winter, there may be Brussels sprouts cut in half and sautéed over medium-high heat with butter and salt.
They may be the same golden brown color each time. Some days I will have used the tablespoon-nub of butter leftover from the morning’s pancakes.
Some days I’ll have opened a new stick and left the rest—seven unused tablespoons—with one wrapper end open in the fridge door for a future chef’s satisfaction.
