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| Still Life with Guitar by Juan Grís (1920) |
Once in a while, I find an unconventional placeholder related to memorable text or art in the pages of a book I’ve read. Something that seems new to me at first. Then I remember why I left it there. Beauty in the bricolage of life exists even if life is showing its fangs on the day you find it. Two recently encountered items stand out.
Item 1: Olfactory-rich text in the “Doldrums” chapter of Tristes Tropiques by renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (left) and a light blue-green “Swimming SW6764” paint swatch used as a bookmark (right). The passage is beautiful, fragrant and highly sensorial. I long for a bottle of its perfume after reading it, a sentiment I had when I first came across the passage 12 years ago.
The traveler approaching the New World is first conscious of it as a scent very different from the one suggested back in Paris by the connotations of the word Brazil, and difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it.
At first, it seemed that the sea smells of the preceding weeks had ceased to circulate so freely; they had come up against an invisible wall: thus immobilized, they no longer claimed the traveler’s attention, which was now drawn towards smells that were of a quite different nature and that nothing in his past experience enabled him to define: they were like a forest breeze alternating with hot-house scents, the quintessence of the vegetable kingdom, and held a particular freshness so concentrated as to be transmuted into a kind of olfactory intoxication, the last note of a powerful chord sounded separately as if to isolate and fuse the successive intervals of diversely fruity fragrances. This can only be appreciated by someone who has buried their face in a freshly cut tropical red pepper, after having previously, in some botequin of the Brazilian sertão, inhaled the aroma of the black honeyed coils of the fumo de rolo, made from tobacco leaves, fermented and rolled into several lengths several yards long. In the blend of these closely allied scents, he can recognize an America, which, for thousands of years, was alone in its possession of their secrets.
But when, at four o’clock in the morning of the following day, the New World at last appeared on the horizon, its visible image seemed worthy of its perfume.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012, page 78.
Leví-Strauss’ words enter and exit the reader’s mind with the dreamy languor of incense smoke. Transforming the passage into a perfume (an ephemeral creation that triggers and inspires memories) makes perfect sense. The book, originally written in French, was published in 1955. Translations exist, but the same can’t be said for the creation of a perfume based on the excerpt—70 years later.
The second item I found is a pattern made by randomness. A train ticket covering a page of haiku is engaged in a visual dialogue with a painting on the opposite page. I didn’t make a connection at the time, as the ticket served as an ad hoc bookmark when the train was pulling into the Larchmont Metro-North train station in Westchester County.
Item 2:
A Japanese brush painting titled “Shoots of the Horsetail Plant” by Saitô Shôshû (left) is situated opposite a New Haven line Metro-North Railroad ticket, circa early 2000 (right). The painting, which is next to four unseen haiku beneath the train ticket, uses the same shades of red and black ink found on the commutation ticket. The item on the left is art; the item on the right is art by association.
I’ve taken the New Haven line infrequently and am better acquainted with the trees, shrubs, plants and long grass that grow alongside the riverside tracks of the Hudson line across from the Palisades. Though I recall specific seasonal views, memories of 14 years of commuting to and from Hastings-on-Hudson and Grand Central Terminal on the Metro-North have merged.
My mind connects commuting experiences by type versus single experience, unless there's an experience worth recalling that breaks through the monotony of routine commuting. The fact that eidetic memory isn’t common makes sense as it would be a recipe for hell if we remembered everything. One part Sherlock Holmes knack, the other a not-so-friendly invitation into a well-fitting straitjacket with less time to live in the present.
It's interesting how the way we think and remember is reflected in the material things we hold onto. Each item saved serves as a potential catalyst for reminiscence that allows us to organize personal meaning with agency as a witness to our own life.
This is particularly important when the people who raised us, the archivists of our lives, are no longer here to answer questions about our past that inform our present life. In this respect, meaningful things we save don't leave us empty-handed until we decide that they don't change the fact that unanswered questions are a part of life.
"A New Day Every Day" (2014) by Sarah Nicole Phillips. The branching pattern of trees (dendritic) is found in nature and appears in the veins of leaves, the pattern of roots, and human arteries, veins and capillaries. The collage is designed using security envelope papers. I've begun collecting security envelopes that accompany bills, the kind with designs on the underside that obscure the contents inside the envelope from being seen on the outside. Common designs include confetti, linen, burlap and crosshatched patterns printed in blue or black ink. Once in a while, a security envelope with an ornamental pattern arrives and breaks the monotony.
I consider repetitive patterns in nature and stumble across an unexpected find. A recording of Salvador Dalí talking about logarithmic patterns in relationship to the unique spiral pattern of a rhinoceros horn (an obsession of his).
Then it becomes clear to me. It's not the safety aspect of security envelopes that I'm attached to, it's the meaning of patterns and the way they connect and disconnect in earthly and spiritual ways. It's why I can't help wondering whether Dalí, an artist fond of using found objects in his sculptures and assemblages, left traces of his personal life behind in the pages of the books he owned.
Notes & Curiosities
It's not uncommon for secondhand booksellers to find personal items inside copies of used books sold by their previous owners. There isn't an all-encompassing word for the items found inside a previous owner's books as contents vary, though most are relics of life experience. Glass Petal Smoke leans towards "personalia" as it complements marginalia. Curious about what people leave inside their books? Begin by searching for "things booksellers find inside used or antiquarian books".
Note to haiku lovers. The second "find" in this story was located in A Net of Fireflies: Japanese Haiku & Haiku Paintings, translated by Harold Stewart.
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