Breaking the Glass

In 1992 I made this wall panel, Let Us Decide, with a crystal glass and the brush at the ready for any mishaps. I placed the glass there for its beauty and its fragility, but I never quite understood the richness of its meaning until recently when I began to think about the significance of breaking a glass, and its opposite, raising a glass.

I once purposely broke a glass. It was wanton destruction, a grand assertion, a scream, a proclamation of my conviction. It was an action that I chose because I didn’t know what else to do. I was standing in a noisy, packed bar, crowded with the fervor of Thank God it’s Friday. For those of you who know me, this is rare indeed. In Connecticut with my stepfather Bill, we were there to watch my daughter, Ariel, at a big dressage horse event, and I was telling Bill about this new man I was dating, and he wasn’t getting it. He thought I was making a mistake, that I should date more people, be loose, be free, find someone who was this way or that, but for me it nonnegotiable. I had made the decision. 

I don’t typically get angry and raise my voice and shout. What could I do? Bill simply wouldn’t back down. So I moved my hand down to the stem of my glass of merlot wine, and with a deliberate gesture, I tipped it hard enough against the bar for it to break. The noise shocked, the wine spilled over the counter, and the glass shards lay in the spilled wine. The barman rushed over with a rag and assured me that it was all right. Everyone around continued their loud Friday revel. This action was my poem, my art. I had to show Bill that my decision was nonnegotiable.

A Jewish wedding is not complete until a glass is shattered and Mazel Tov resounds. Traditionally, it was the groom who raised his leather clad foot and lowered it solidly on the white cloth wrapped wine glass. It’s an odd custom. To break the glass, to be destructive, seems counterintuitive to the vows of life-long love and support. Of course the glass is a symbol of the fragility of human relationships, but in the Jewish weddings I have attended, the breaking of the glass resounds with celebration.

One explanation says that it refers to the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem, a more contemporary approach speaks of the breaking down of barriers between people, and another suggests that we are reminded that in this time of joy there is also pain and suffering. I even read a humorous account: That’s the last time the man will ever get to put his foot down. All of them sound like rationalizations.

I see the breaking of the glass at a Jewish wedding as the physical sign of the irrevocability of the decision to wed. It demonstrates the couple’s willingness to do something that is intentionally, and ridiculously, binding — get married, tie yourself to another person for life, do this thing that so many do, and yet, as we all know, is hard to do well. In breaking the glass, the couple says, “We’ve done it! It’s our foolishness, our fearlessness, and our great love for each other that has won over every other consideration.”

Last night, my oldest son, Alex, and his beautiful bride, Connie, celebrated their marriage. They didn’t break a glass, but we certainly raised many glasses to them. There is a poem/toast that I love by the poet Richard Wilbur. In the first line he refers to a story from the Bible. Mary and her son, Jesus, along with his disciples, were guests at Cana’s wedding feast. At one point, the host hurried up to her and said there is no more wine. How humiliating to run out of wine at a wedding!  Mary who already knew that her son was going to work miracles went up to him and said, “They have run out of wine.” And he said, "What has this got to do with me, my time has not yet come.”  But she told the servants to do as he asked.  Jesus went outside to pray for a few minutes, then returned, and Mary saw the serene expression on his face. He had asked the servants to fill the large jugs with water.

St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine. 

— Richard Wilbur

Whether we choose to break a glass or raise a glass, it’s the courage of commitment that we celebrate. Mazel Tov I say to Alex and Connie, and daughter, Vita.

And to bring this story full circle, two years ago, I married Blase, the man who was the trigger for my broken glass. My stepfather, Bill, raised his glass and made the first toast at our wedding. 

String Art

Margot Stage’s voice is known to many listeners of Boston’s public radio station, WGBH. She was a producer and host there for twenty years, but these days she is devoting more of her time to her art. She is one of the artists exhibiting in the farm’s outdoor sculpture walk this year.

We had already chosen a site along the wooded high trail, before the day of her installation. Margot and her husband, David Crane, also an artist, arrived with thirty-some balls of looped twine, cloth, and rope in varying shades of natural, white, and grey, bursting out of three large garbage bags. I drove these up to her installation site in our red golf cart-like ‘mule,’ rolled the heavy bags out of the back, and went off to help her husband install his wood pyramid sculpture, Nubian. 

Later, when I went back up to the high road to see how Margot’s installation was progressing, she had already finished. I walked among hanging orbs suspended on invisible strands of monofilament between the trees and across the path. I felt myself choking with emotion.

In 2011, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the year that followed was filled with surgery, chemo treatments, and radiation. When it was all over, I was tired, tired from my treatments, and tired of being tired. The canyon separating me from my artistic life seemed impossible to cross.

My studio is usually a bazaar of small bronze figures, wax figures, hammers, saws, power grinders, drills, found objects, wood, branches, stones, shells, wire, and fibers. The entire space is devoted to deconstruction and construction. Given my limited strength, I knew my choice of medium had to be simple. I wasn’t going to use power tools or carve wood. I chose string.

Without much forethought, I grabbed a ball of thick twine and began to make loose loops. Following a quiet rhythm, I made a knotted loop every ten inches or so. A large pile of looped twine accumulated at my feet. When the ball was finished, I picked up the mass by gathering a few of the loops together and hung it up from the ceiling. The collected twine hung down, while the loops projected out chaotically in all directions. It was a sculpture, a hanging field of texture and energy.

Intrigued, the next day I picked up another ball of twine, this one solid black. I looped for most of the afternoon, and then hung up the pile again. This one was smaller and felt very different—the black was ominous. While I was looping, there was no sense of accomplishment: nothing complicated, no self-expression, no thoughts about the outcome. While doing this repetitive work I felt at peace and serene. My only rule was that I would finish the ball of rope or twine that I started, no matter its length, before taking another ball. The month passed, and the dangling masses of looped rope, twine, and yarn swayed like strange sea creatures from my ceiling. Some shapes were stiff and short, while others dangled almost to the floor.

Detail of looped string

At that time, I was asked to propose a sculpture for a mill building that was being developed into condominium units, I asked Margot if she wanted to collaborate. “Wow,” she said in her deep radio voice, upon seeing the jungle of organisms filling my studio. We arranged to go to the mill together the following week. Thinking of the water source that fueled the mill, we came up with the idea for Source, a fifteen-foot free-hanging waterfall of looped ropes.

We used much of my looped material and ordered more. Then, each on our own, we looped quantities of string and rope. We met at the farm and began tying all these ropes together, cascading them from a second level porch. We used the thicker ropes at the top and added in smaller diameter ropes to echo the natural fall of water.

Installing Source with Margot, David Crane, & Blase Provitola in the tree.

We didn’t get that commission; the developer decided against any art. Instead, we exhibited Source at Old Frog Pond Farm’s annual sculpture walk in 2012. But Margot and I decided we loved working together. We received a commission to make a waterfall that cascaded several stories over a central staircase for the Arsenal for the Arts, an art complex in Watertown. The Source material went into Waterfall, which then traveled to Cape Cod for an exhibition on the Provincetown dunes. When that exhibit was over, all the knotted ropes went into storage under my studio.

This past spring, Margot called with a question: “Linda, would you mind if I used the bagged rope and string material?” She had an idea for a new sculpture. I said, “Go ahead! It’s yours.” With this old looped string from our previous collaboration, Margot made a piece for the Art Ramble in Concord, Black Lives Matter. Then, as she was cleaning up from that project, she started winding the remaining string into balls just like a knitter does with loose yarn. These balls, became Orbs, Margot’s installation for the 2016 sculpture exhibit—the piece I was so moved by. Recognizing the material in many of the orbs as being the original looped string, I yelled, “Margot,” as I saw her walking towards her husband’s wooden pyramid below. “Wait for me!”

I rushed down to meet her. “I got so emotional seeing your piece,” I said. And we hugged.

Working in my studio after my cancer treatments had been the beginning of my creative spirit’s recovery. Margot’s new iteration with string, Orbs, reminded me again of the healing power of both art and collaboration. Come to the farm on weekends, now through Columbus Day, 11-5 pm, and let the art touch your emotions. Or join Margot and me on Saturday, October 1 at 2pm when we lead a guided tour of the exhibit.

Orbs, Margot Stage

Poetry and Photosynthesis: It's all in the Leaves

At the farm last Sunday, Stephen Collins performed a solo play about Walt Whitman, Unlaunch’d Voices, by Michael Z. Keamy. Whitman, as the play begins, grumbles about the poor reception for his book, Leaves of Grass — his life work, his own body, his soul! They didn’t even like the title, he complained. The critics pointed out that grass doesn’t have leaves, it has spears, and protested that the poetry was bombastic, egotistical, and vulgar. He garnered a few good, anonymous reviews, that is, written by himself. Today, Leaves of Grass is one of greatest songs of America. Take heart writers and artists! You may never know the value of the gifts you are offering.

Our performance was outdoors, the first time that Collins had performed in plein air. Collins, all 6’ 5” of him, flung his gallant arms to the sky and strode along the pond edge. At times I felt as if he might plunge in with a big splash, but he remained well-rooted to the ground. Collin’s portrait of Whitman resembled a great tree waving its leaves, encouraging, praising, admonishing, and loving all at once, a great giving creature.

Trees are giving creatures, too, turning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars. When the heavens provide enough rain, sun, and warmth, the tree makes lots of sugars. In fact, trees feed these sugars down to the fungi, which live attached to the roots. Later, if a tree calls for food, the fungi send any surplus back up. Trees are also companionable. Scientists have injected radioactive isotopes into a tree in order to follow the sugar flow and have watched it move down to the forest floor and up into the trunk of a neighboring tree.

Deciduous trees release their leaves in the fall. They rest for the winter, and then have to produce another full set of leaves in spring if they are going to survive. No leaves, and death comes quite quickly. Our apples trees have been stressed all summer from the drought. Early in the season we could irrigate, but then the wetlands' water level dropped too low, and the intake for the pump clogs with weeds. It’s good our apple trees weren’t carrying a load of fruit.

Macintosh Trees with no Apples, LH photo, Sept, 2016

In 2012, we also had no fruit. This was a puzzle to both growers and scientists. No one could quite pin down the reason, though many hazarded guesses. Now, once again, we have been in severe drought conditions, and the trees have no fruit. We had some blossoms in April, but it was much fewer than I would have expected (even taking into consideration the 2015 bumper crop). We had bitter cold in February, which is when New England lost the peach crop, and then the freeze in April seemed to have taken the apple blossoms. That’s one way to explain why we have no apples, but I think there is something else we don’t know about in the equation.

Something that the trees know.

Who is to say that the trees didn’t see severe drought crawling towards us long before we experienced it, and they did what they needed to do to prepare? They let go of their possessions, their precious fruit, and kept their leaves so they could sustain themselves through the desert conditions. We are only beginning to discover the wisdom in leaves and trees. Scientists recently found that when a tree is dying, it will get rid of its excess carbon by sending it to a healthy neighbor.

There is equally great wisdom in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God .  .  .  read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . .

This week our Sunday afternoon farm event is the 4th annual plein air poetry walk. The poets of Old Frog Pond Farm will gather to walk the land and read their poems at the sites that inspired their leaves. Splash is this year’s theme — join us at 2pm — as organizer Susan Edwards Richmond leads us around the pond and through the orchard.

I have never

bent grateful

as this blade of grass,

bearing the hiss, ping ping

sound of insufficient blessing

on my naked, needy back.

—from the poem “Hiss, ping, ping” by Lucinda Bowen

Cover of "Splash Plein Air Poetry", Painting by Martha Wakefield

In the Plenty of Time

In his autobiographical book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday, describes summer on the plain in Oklahoma where he spent his childhood: “Great green-and-yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time.”

I loved that phrase, going nowhere in the plenty of time. It reminded me of my time in New Guinea with my mother. No running water or electricity, but plenty of bugs, plants, sweat, babies crying, dogs barking, men with shaved heads and men with long hair, women wearing only grass skirts or thin calico shifts. When I talk about this experience, people always ask, what did you do there? 

LH in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, 1971

We would sit, walk to another hamlet in the village, walk out to the road to wait for a truck which might or might not come, make flower leis, braid dry grasses, roast beetles and eat them, maybe play cat’s cradle. Some villagers went to their gardens to dig up taro root or yams – their gardens looked just like the rest of the forest. There might be coconuts to gather and a delicious pudding to make. Smoking, of course, (but I didn’t), rolling sticky black tobacco in pieces of old newspaper; and chewing betelnut (slightly hallucinogenic) — mixing it with a little mustard and powdered lime that would turn bright red when you spit the combination out after chewing (I did a little.)

Elder women swept the bare ground clear of leaf litter every morning and burned their collections in small fires. Younger women walked to a cave a mile away to bring back the day’s drinking water.

The women sometimes would sit on the ground with legs out straight, a board with carved patterns on their lap, scraping sharp shells over fresh banana leaves, pressing them into this board to make doba, their currency. Men might be working on a wood carving to sell in the main town to a tourist or at the Methodist mission. All of this was going nowhere in the plenty of time.

 There were highlights of course. The night a man died and we entered the hut to see his body laid out over his daughters’ legs. The mourners wailed, and then when the crying lapsed, they told stories and laughed. They decorated him with bands of red and white paint. And on my last night (my mother was staying on), one of the big chiefs announced he would kill a chicken! The villagers were ecstatic – they knew that this meant he would kill a pig, and we would feast and dance. They never did explain just how they knew.

Life seemed more about just living, not about producing. It was the fabric of relationships that always needed tending. Relationships between lovers, husbands and wives, children, clans, mother’s brothers, brother’s sisters, uncles, and when there was a death — the real work began. Mourning took many forms and was done by many people. Some blackened their bodies for a year, someone carried the deceased’s purse, which held his lime stick and lime pot, others shaved their heads. All of these mourners would eventually need to be paid back in elaborate ceremonies acknowledging their gifts of mourning, paid back with large baskets of doba, those banana leaf bundles, (that I carried on my head in the photo from last week’s blog.)

N. Scott Momaday returned to Rainy Mountain after the death of his grandmother and recalls his experience of the life that went on all around her:

There were frequent prayer meetings, and great nocturnal feasts. When I was a child, I played with my cousins outside, where the lamplight fell upon the ground and the singing of the old people rose up around us and carried away into the darkness. There were lots of good things to eat, a lot of laughter and surprise. And afterwards, when the quiet returned, I lay down with my grandmother and could hear the frogs away by the river and feel the motion of air.

Wind Sculpture, Michio Ihara     photo:Robert Hesse at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio

I think about our Western fixation with time, with spending it wisely, with being productive, and compare it to the importance of being together, nurturing relationships, doing everything in the plenty of time.

we watched the crows

hard pears

in no hurry to ripen

—LH