The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 10: July 16

Today I started reading a book called How to Navigate Today. How to Navigate Today is not a spiritual guide but a book about actual nautical navigation written in the ’40s by a woman named Marion Rice Hart. Marion Rice Hart was born in 1891 and was a chemical engineer, a geologist, a research physicist, a miner, a surveyor, a sculptor, a painter, a photographer, a sailboat skipper, an aviator, an author, and a radio operator. According to the preface of How to Navigate Today, Rice Hart navigated her day by keeping a low profile. “She has never been a noisy rebel flouting the conventions for women of her generation; she has just quietly done what she felt like doing.”

I am navigating today by drawing the tap handle I found in my dining room wall. What continues to confound me is why I cannot simply own, as in possess in a manner that is satisfying, this tap handle. My inability to enjoyably accomplish this calls into question how I’ve managed, in the past, to own anything successfully. What does it mean to own this wooden table, this pottery bowl, this random ancestor painting (not my ancestor)? Owning is revealed as a doubly passive business. One just sits around owning these things one already owns. My doubt in my overall owning abilities, however, remains focused on the tap handle. I frequently experience the urge to flailingly, like with my mind or my heart or my body, fuck the thing.

Given the l’amour fou diagnosis I received from my artist friend, I clearly require treatment. I have decided, as previously stated, to draw the tap handle each morning even though I do not draw (unless I’m hanging out with children). I’ve never seen a still life of spice jars or a sunset or a person and thought, I want to draw that. My capturing impulses are not visual. In the past, if I wanted to capture an object, I owned it.

Yet I do not know how to own the tap handle, perhaps because it has been in a state of dis-ownership for so many years. It was found between the wall studs of my house by a guy who demo-ed our dining room. Who knows how a tap handle ended up in a wall. There are plenty of objects in our walls that make sense — the old newspapers added insulation, the old razor blades were too sharp to throw in the trash heaps hidden like Abenaki middens in the back woods — and others that don’t, like the vertebra of a cow. I, too, have been frustrated by objects that you cannot file anywhere in your life, but neither can you throw them away. They drift around a house transiently, in a death row limbo, first on the dining room table, then on a bookshelf. Suddenly there’s a hole in the wall, and an opportunity presents itself. I can get rid of this object while still keeping it. This is what I imagine the person who put the tap handle in the wall thought at the time.

So I decided that the only way to treat my affliction was to draw the tap handle, because the act of drawing would be frustrating enough to possibly distract me from the inherent frustration of the object. I would draw it every day. (It would become my “everyday object,” like the tumbleweed the Eames hung from their ceiling.) I started work each morning by drawing the tap handle; afterward I would draw, in words, the day. The poet Mary Ruefle wrote, “an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning of obscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward.” If an object is relegated to dailiness it becomes a part of you. It is ingested by habit. It is stored between the studs of the walls of your self. When I’m autopsied they will find inside — this tap handle, a child too scared to go to matinees, a song I once loved, maybe also a cow bone and some old news. Who knows what else I’ve hidden in there because I could make no sense of it at the time, and found nowhere else to put it.