The found object is also the finding one. It’s just the science of time meets person meets location. It’s the little thrill of finding the most perfect cashmere coat in a thrift shop. When you set out for the day you did not know that’s exactly what you wanted. Something about the cut of cloth, the texture, called out to you, struck a chord. Even before trying it on you know the fit will be fine.
Many sculptors who work in metals keep large scrap piles in their yard. They never know when the light might shine just right on a particular piece. Assemblage artists and those who do installations often scour streets, alleys, shores, the sides of roads. Their eyes have the precise vision of owls and their fingers are Geiger counters. Collage artists stockpile paper scraps whether torn from a magazine or found in a box of bequeathed memorabilia. Seamstresses and tailors hoard fabric as knitters do yarn. Think of Rumplestiltskin spinning straw into gold only with no thought of blackmailing the Miller’s daughter. Imagine doors opening onto chambers after chamber of raw silk, how the strands of swags hang colorful as the most flavorful spaghetti.
I can still vividly recall at least two different women patients coming to the HIV unit I worked on, equipped with crayons, markers, coloring books, poster board. One always said to me that she could not leave home without bringing along her art. I admired her tenaciousness. I felt a kinship with the undefined outsider status of both women as they went on instinctively choosing what shades and artistic instruments to use whether coloring inside the lines or not.
What’s so magical about interior design is even if you can’t afford to move, if you rearrange the furniture, change the color of couch covers or curtains, suddenly the urge to get going might abate for a while.
Once I read of a family who was so poor that all they could afford were cardboard furnishings. Yet they shellacked, they varnished, they polished, and the tones of beige shone honey-golden.
In my hallway, set along the stair banisters, is a long rectangular table top, hand-made I assume. Perhaps it was someone’s school project. Perhaps it was a hobby that’s gone out of fashion. Whatever the case, by the time I found it, waiting for the dump truck, someone must have felts its usefulness had been outlived. Still, they were thoughtful enough to bag up its table legs and tape them to the back. I tried at first to screw them in place, but as a carpenter’s apprentice soon gave up.
It was its inlaid tiles, framed by a dark oak, which caught my attention right from the get-go anyhow. There are four tiles to be exact, perfect foot and a half squares of smoky ochre. Each is cut into a design which fits with its neighbor jigsaw-precise. All are very geometrical: octagons within circles within triangles within ellipses. Sometimes the whole thing looks art deco to me, and at other moments, Byzantine.
As I write, gathering the disparate threads of a similar theme here in my subconscious beats the loud steady ticking of a clock, and that found curbside table is like the fragment of a temple continuing to find some part in me which I did not know I’d ever lost.
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