Reflections on White Paint

When I was about seven years old someone gave me a box of water paints – the typical small box with about ten little blocks of colours.  This was probably in 1946, just after the end of the Second World War, which we had spent in the Netherlands; the paint-box may have been included in a “relief” parcel sent by American friends of my parents (“We’ll add a toy or two for the children”) because I doubt very much whether such a thing was available at that time in that war-devastated country.  

My father, home again after having spent the last three of the war years in a prisoner-of-war camp, showed me how to use the paints – for instance, how to blend the blue with white to produce the colour of the sky.  I discovered how much white was needed in comparison with the small amount of blue, and I realized that the little white block would be used up much more quickly than the other colours, and that – in the conditions of the time – I would never be able to replace it.  It was a devastating discovery and, as I seem to remember, it pretty well spoiled my pleasure in the paints.

Using things up and not being able to replace them: this cause of anxiety was by then a central element of my image of the world.  It had been drilled into me by the war-time conditions.  Food was short: “That’s all the bread there is for now, darling, but you can have a bit more of the rye soup.”  (“For now” might mean until next week, or whenever my mother was again able to scrounge something from which to make bread.)  There was no clothing to be bought, so my mother was constantly cutting up and re-sewing her own and her husband’s clothes for us children or bartering with neighbouring mothers who had children of different ages.  

The effect of that strand of experience – the irreplaceability of most things – has run through my whole life.  When I was teaching in Toronto and lost a favourite pen I dealt with the resulting (and entirely disproportionate) anxiety by going as soon as possible to buy another.  I found a kind of shoe that I liked and, before the style was no longer available, I bought two more pairs.  With certain “treat” foods, I always have a couple of extra packages (or four or five?) on hand in case ….

 Like many writers, I love notebooks but when I’ve bought one I put it away because it’s too precious to use.  I now forbid myself from buying any more, and I worry about whether and how, in my few remaining years, I will be able to use up the ones I already have.

For nearly eighty years a voice inside me has been saying, “Don’t use it all because it’s so precious and irreplaceable!” – and, even worse, “Don’t use it at all!”

Nearly eighty years after I received that first paint-box I’ve now decided to try water-colour painting again – a mental-health activity for my old age – but I vividly remember the “white paint” issue and even before buying a set of colours I made sure that I would be able to buy more white paint.  Yes, little tubes of every colour are individually available, and, yes, I can buy as many tubes of white as I want.  So I can let myself paint again, and enjoy it without worrying about running out of the white.

Of course this is not just about paint or notebooks or shoes.  It’s about war and especially about children.  For the sake of my mental health I can no longer bear to keep informed about the world’s wars but I know that there are millions of children who, day after day, are being imprinted with experiences that will shape (or distort) their future lives, affect their work and their relationships, and probably be part of the emotional burden that, every morning, they will wake up to and resume.

© Marianne Brandis, 2024.

Reflections on a "between" place

My porch is only two steps up from the paved walk – just right.  It’s a small degree of separation but a distinct one, a nice shading between connection and detachment.  

In summer it’s my outdoor living room.  Spread on tables and chairs are the books that I’m reading, and also writing materials, a bottle of water, and a cup of tea or a glass of wine.  I trustingly leave some things there overnight (nothing valuable) and have only twice in 25 years had anything stolen.   There are potted plants on the railing, mostly geraniums; although the porch faces south, it’s impossible to have anything very sun-loving because in summer there’s deep shade from a mountain ash and a juniper, and from a big maple in my front garden, and from the even higher trees beyond that.

As a liminal space between indoors and outdoors, it shares elements of both.  Its two walls and a low railing give it a semi-enclosed feel but it’s open to the weather.  I enjoy being close to the weather but sheltered from it, sitting there when rain is falling just beyond the edge of the roof.  I feel and hear every wind that blows.  Fallen leaves drift into the porch and settle comfortably around the edges.

I might also sit there on a mild winter afternoon with a cup of tea, protected from the wind and appreciating the winter sun shining through the lattice of bare branches.  

Now, during the pandemic, I’m doing all my entertaining there, not only in the warm weather but also when it’s decidedly chilly, and during the lockdown my brother Gerard and I (who at that time were not yet a bubble) have sat there when the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing.  For his birthday dinner in 2020 we had to wear winter coats.

In the summer, guests visit for a cup of tea or a glass of wine, or a passing friend who sees me sitting there stops in to say hello.  There’s always a bottle of white wine in the refrigerator in case an impromptu stop-in turns into a longer visit.  The porch has space for four people comfortably, but room can be made for six.  For evening visits, I provide light with one or two oil lamps, and the soft lamplight turns the foliage of the mountain ash and the juniper into something semi-solid, almost like tapestry.  On particularly warm nights there are likely to be fireflies in the mountain ash. 

Two or three times, when a sudden summer downpour has caught pedestrians (strangers) by surprise, I’ve beckoned them in to shelter on the porch until the rain stopped.

I also share the porch with other creatures: squirrels, cats, raccoons, a chipmunk.  Ants, mosquitoes, bumblebees, wasps.  One evening a firefly wandered in.  Robins, grackles, sparrows, cardinals, and jays regularly sit in the mountain ash and inspect me closely, and inquisitive chickadees will fly into the porch to have a closer look.  One year a pair of robins built their nest in the juniper.  A few years ago a duck from Stratford’s lake, which is just a block away, would wander in and happily eat the crushed corn that I put out for her.

Most of all, however, it’s a place to be alone.  Its roof and walls protect my vulnerabilities when it’s uncomfortable to be under the open sky.  I read and think there, and I do the part of the writing process that involves rumination and making notes.  I don’t use my electronics: it’s a place for reading books and for mulling, for hand-writing, journal-writing.  Like other thresholds it provides insights, and I allow myself quiet time there to pursue trains of thought.  When I’m sitting still, my mind works very differently than it does when my body is in motion.

Quite often I just sit listening to the sound of the wind and feeling the air on my skin, so different from indoor air.  I watch the patterns of light and wind and weather, the way the branches and leaves move.  I exchange glances with the birds in the mountain ash.  A few people pass on the usually-quiet street: on the porch I’m neither with people nor alone.  I sit still while the world moves.  When I’m moving I see the world as static, so that in order to see its movement I have to be still. 

On the porch I’m detached and yet involved, just as I am as a writer.  I face both inward and outward.  “Between”, after all, denotes both connection and separation, and the porch is a “between” space, like other places and situations where I’m comfortable.  

© Marianne Brandis, 2022

Reflections on Mountains

Mountains begin as geology, stony wrinkles in the earth’s crust.  They become landscape, part of our home, the environment that has evolved on this beautiful planet.  They culminate as symbol, dwellings for the imagination and the spirit.

At first mountains were bare rock, forced into existence by the slow pressure of changes in the earth’s crust.

Gradually, over time, their slopes became clothed in vegetation.  As they became a home for plants and animals, they also became a home for humans.  And they became landscape.  “Landscape” is a human concept, formulated by the human brain and imagination.  We love to give names to things.

But humans also always move beyond what is “merely” visible.  To all human societies, world-wide, mountains have always been much more than just geology or just landscape.  Mountains, and especially mountaintops, are sacred places.  Think of Mount Sinai, Mount Fuji, Mount Olympus.  They are the places where the earth and its occupants come closest to “sky” and to the powers who live there.

***

On my desk there is a photograph of mountains, the mountains of British Columbia among which I spent eleven years in my youth.  It was only after I moved away to flat parts of the country that I realized how important those mountains had been in forming my image of the world, not just the physical shape of the planet but the world of the imagination.

I’ve never climbed a real mountain – not actually, physically climbed one – but I know about climbing, the tug of the leg-muscles, the gasping and clawing for breath.  Climbing a mountain is hard work.  And the physical effort of climbing a mountain has always been, for humans, a metaphor for other kinds of effort and struggle, and for achievement.

For people who actually do climb mountains, the mountain is a challenge, an opponent.  For me, on the other hand, being a non-climber, the mountains among which I lived in my youth were companions, vast beings that shared my world.  While the climber looks at them nose-to nose, as it were, while climbing, I looked at them from the side, and upwards.

For me, there was a marked difference between the mountains and the valley floor, between flatness and slope, between low and high.  Being able to see and feel both of them at the same time enlarged my conception of what was.  There was this place, and there was that place, co-existing.  While walking to school or helping with the farm-work, at any time, I could look up and see a different place, somewhere else.

The shapes of the mountains were outlined against cloud and sky – a horizon that is far different from the kind that’s found in flat country.  

Even though I’ve never stood on the top of a mountain, I know about mountaintops.  We all do, deep inside us.  A mountaintop is a place apart.  That makes it sacred – automatically sacred.  Literature from all parts of the world is full of sacred mountains.

***

So what began as geology – rocky, hard – has grown and evolved into the spiritual.  Humans have always found meaning in things – found it or invented it.  The imaginative and spiritual world that we have created for ourselves on this planet has its origin in rocks and water and plants and animals but it has gone much beyond that.  We now have a whole complex vision: what we see with the eye of our imagination is a web of meaningful relationships among all those physical things.  We have infused the landscape, the shape of our world, with meaning.  In turn, that meaningful environment enlarges the dimensions of our thinking, our aspirations, and our vision.

© Marianne Brandis, 2017

Reflections on Downsizing and Creativity

I’m seventy-seven years old and, like most of my contemporaries, I’m downsizing.  I live in a tall, narrow house (lots of stairs!), and I know that in the next few years I’ll need to move to something smaller.

To transform the chore into a worthwhile experience, I’m thinking about what I’m doing – and writing about it, because writing is what I do to make sense of things. 

Downsizing, I’m discovering, involves creativity and imagination.  To make the innumerable decisions between “keep” and “discard”, I have to envision what my future life will look like.  Since I was a teenager, I’ve been creating my life by setting goals, making choices, inventing, and imagining.   It’s not surprising that this continues into old age: downsizing is, in some ways, a lot like upsizing.  Choices about acquisition always did say something about who I was and who I wanted to be.  Along with practical matters, these decisions drew on images of how I wanted to live and how I would like to be perceived by others.  Now, too, images are useful: I think about old people among my family and friends and consider what kind of old person I am.

I can’t yet visualize the physical space into which I’ll move, but I can make preliminary decisions about what I will want to have there: this desk, those chairs, these dishes (but not those).  This is what I’ll need for my continuing work; this is how I will design the living room, where I will spend time with friends and time alone.

In smaller quarters, I will of course still want to have as much as possible of the life-enhancing quality conferred by books, music, pictures on the walls.  I think of this quality as enrichment.  Will five pictures be as “enriching” as ten, or 500 books as enriching as 1000?  Probably not, I recognize soberly, but I have to cut down.  So there will be (again) choices and compromises.  

Moreover, besides reducing the numbers, there’s also the challenge of moving and recreating the atmosphere of “home.”  I will want to “move” my prime writing space, the attic.  That is, I will have to pack not only the papers and the pencils and the stapler in cardboard boxes, but also try to capture and pack the creative atmosphere and reconstruct it somewhere else.  Will I be able to move that deeply-engrained but intangible quality that supports my creative work and helps to provide the momentum that carries me from one writing session to another?  I’ve done it before; can I do it again?

Downsizing is therefore about both intangible matters and very practical ones.  At both levels, it’s about yardsticks – how I decide what to dispose of and what to keep.  The yardsticks for the practical side are comparatively easy; those for the intangible side are not so easy but are, in general, ones that I’ve used all my life: guidelines about identity, values, memories, plans, and hopes.  What’s new at this stage is that maybe – with care and thought and wisdom, with self-knowledge and common sense – I can use the need for downsizing to focus on the essence by carving away what conceals and muddles it.  Discover the essence.  It’s pruning, the kind of pruning that is beneficial to a tree, encouraging growth, bringing out and enhancing its form.  Within a framework of necessity, perhaps there can be yet another flowering.

© Marianne Brandis, 2016.

Reflections on a Moment in Time

A few years ago, the Google street-view of my street showed me standing beside my car, locking or unlocking it.  It was an unimportant episode in one of my days, but it gave a glimpse of a moment in time: that moment, that spot on the surface of the planet.

Sometimes, even without Google’s help, a moment in time is suddenly and unexpectedly illuminated.  More than three and a half million years ago, three people walked across a patch of wet volcanic ash in what is now Laetoli, Tanzania.  The tracks they made were covered by another layer of ash and hidden until they were found in 1978 by Paul Abell and Mary Leakey.  The tracks were important because they put the date for human bipedalism – two-footed walking – quite a lot earlier than it had, until then, been set at, and they showed that those very early humans walked pretty much the way we do today.  Those three people, out on their daily errands, perhaps to find food or fetch water or look for a strayed child, were unaware that the tracks they left would one day be of enormous significance for understanding the evolution of the human race.

There was another such moment about 5,000 years ago.  In what is now northern Italy, a middle-aged man walked from the valley where he lived up into the Alps.  It was autumn, and at the altitude that he reached it was snowing.  He had probably been hurt in a fight (four of his ribs had been broken quite recently), and he may have been escaping from whatever dangerous situation had led to that injury.  In pain, probably exhausted, he took shelter in a small gully.  He lay down to rest, and he died.  He is now the famous “man in the ice”, and his body and equipment have provided invaluable insight into the life of the Late Neolithic.  As with the Laetoli footprints, a moment in time was preserved because the physical conditions of the time and place were precisely right.

Most of the moments of which history is composed are unrecorded and unimportant.  Large-scale historical narratives that give the big picture are essential to an understanding of the past, but the big picture is made up of moments (think of pixels).  I reflect on the person who looked at a container of curdled milk (“Spoiled!  What am I going to do with it?”) and took a step – whatever it was – in the direction of turning it into cheese.  Or of someone who, talking to a neighbour, said something like, “My mother always threw away the peel of this fruit but I’ve found that when I chew it it cures the stomach ache.”

Where we are now – the planet and its inhabitants – is the result of an accumulation of such moments.  Our understanding of the past, besides being about the big picture, is about the specific and local.  Part of the study of history and the process of making it accessible is concerned with this “specific and local.”  We see something like it in pioneer villages and in the historical writing that begins with a single specific event and traces what led to it.  It appears in the kind of historical fiction that presents the lives of characters who, even if imaginary, are based on research and the informed imagination, the kind of book that allows the modern reader to get a glimpse of what it would feel like to live then.

Those of us who write journals or diaries add to the historical record each time we write an entry: diaries and letters written in the past are precious sources of information.  They are the way in which we leave tracks.  Each entry is the record of a moment in time, a note about where the writer – living in the mesh of personal and public events – is on that day.  We, when we’re writing our journals, have no idea what will matter to future historians: one of my examples, when I was researching history for the books I’ve written, was the question of what people in historical times ate for breakfast.  Almost no one ever recorded such a detail, but for what I was doing I needed to know it.

Moment by moment is how history – the big picture – is created, and it’s how we live.  We, right now (I at the computer, you reading this), are at the very leading edge; we’re part of history as it’s being made.

Sources:

Information about the Laetoli footprints came from Internet sources, mainly a publication from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and information about the Stone Age body in the Alps from Konrad Spindler, The Man in the Ice (original publication © 1993, English translation © 1994).

© Marianne Brandis, 2016.

Reflections on Containers

When we all began to worry about the contents of landfills and the ethics (and practicalities) of the throwaway society, there was a lot of talk about packaging.  Packaging has to do with containers, and I’ve been reflecting on the importance of containers.  Looking around my kitchen, and visualizing the rest of my house and belongings, I’m struck by how large a part containers play in my life: pots and dishes, jars and tins and pitchers and bowls.  The cupboards and the refrigerator are containers.  Beyond the kitchen there are purses and tote bags and bookcases and filing cabinets.  Many ornaments are refined versions of practical objects like jugs and bowls and glasses.

Containers are essential to what we consider civilization.  They’re pretty basic: without them, we can’t prepare food and we can’t carry very much.  

Early and simple containers reveal a lot about our need for them.  The scooping hands or the folded leaf holding a bit of water – it’s in such makeshift arrangements that containers originated.  Most animals don’t have the concept of the container (camels? gophers? kangaroos?), so devising and using them is part of being human.  Half of a coconut shell.  The piece of cloth in which an African woman – even now – wraps and carries things.  Pots, bottles, bowls, baskets, chests, barrels: without them, nothing was possible.  Containers were needed for keeping food, and for travelling and migrating.  The broken pots that an archæologist finds are fragments of containers and, in the archæologists’ skilled hands and perceptive analysis, become crucial parts of how we understand and write human history.

I have a lifelong habit of saving containers.  It goes along with my innate feeling that it’s absurd and wasteful to throw away (or even recycle) anything that still has some usefulness.  When something stops being useful – the tin can from which I’ve just taken the last sardine – I throw it into the recycling box without a second thought, but when I buy a new shoulder bag I put the old one (“might want that sometime”) in a closet – with all the other still-usable bags.  My assemblage of containers (it can’t be called a collection, but maybe a hoard?) includes neatly folded brown paper bags, jars with well-fitting lids, glass juice bottles, cardboard boxes, manila envelopes, wrapping paper.  At one level it’s all very sensible and useful, but at another it’s ridiculous.

Other things are containers too.  Houses hold – contain – our belongings and our lives.  To Nicholas Basbanes’ book On Paper, I owe the insight that a book is a container; by extension, a library is a container full of containers.  Pockets are containers.  Almost everyone on the street is carrying a purse, tote bag, or backpack.  A memory stick contains information.   This website is a virtual container.  My car can be a container – it becomes a temporary home, furnished with water and snacks, a book to read, a few emergency supplies, the little office of writing equipment that I take everywhere.   Our bodies are containers.

When I mull over all this, I realize that a container – besides holding substances or objects or ideas – is something that establishes boundaries, distinguishes between what is inside it and what is outside.  A circumference.  That means that, along with being a necessary part of how life is managed, it is closely related to our mental and imaginative way of looking at the world.

© Marianne Brandis, 2016

Reflections on the Roots of Trees

Because I’m interested in the invisible side of what is visible, I sometimes reflect on the roots of trees, the subterranean parts of those big, strong, long-lived beings that are so important in shaping our world.  Some of my writing is done in front of a window that looks into the crowns of trees – a Japanese maple close by, then a large native maple, several big spruces, and other trees beyond that and off to the sides, a whole screen.  

I watch the wildlife whose habitat this is – crows and blue jays in the spruces, and in the maple all kinds of birds including, sometimes, woodpeckers and nuthatches.  Squirrels, of course.  Their movements help me to feel my way into the shape and texture of the tree: this branch slopes this way, that one crosses it.  They seem to have some established routes, like the Native peoples and fur traders in their canoes, following a stream and then portaging to the next.  As I watch the squirrels, my hands become little black claws, gripping bark.  Like the squirrel, I stop to nibble something, or to freeze in watchfulness.

From my desk I observe the motion of the branches, varying in their response to different kinds of wind and differences in the bulk of foliage that they’re carrying.  Being at tree-crown level, I’m close to the leaves in their cycle from the bursting of the buds to the autumnal severing, and to the revealing, minimalist state of the tree in winter.

And I think about the trees’ roots.  Like them, as they feel their way through the soil with delicate but strong fingers, my mind probes their world, their life.  Obstructions: a solid lump of earth can perhaps be pried apart, but a stone may have to be circumvented.  How big is it?  How hard?  No matter – the root begins to explore the stone’s shape and dimensions.  

The whole root structure is almost a mirror reflection of the tree’s crown, a similar network existing out of sight.  All parts of the tree, visible and invisible, nourish each other, water and nutrients flowing through leaf and wood.  As I sit here ruminating about the life of the maple tree in my back garden, I can feel the slow flowing of its nutritional system because my body contains something similar.

I reflect on the stress that the trees’ roots suffer during storms.  Occasionally you see an entire tree blown over, roots and all, and then you can sense the enormous struggle that took place, how the roots must have striven to hold on and then, in spite of their strength, had their grip broken or their fibres pulled apart.

When I moved into this house and began to dig in the garden, I came upon the remnants of the root system from a large tree.  The stump was no longer visible above the surface, but when I began digging I discovered what tree roots look like when they’re so decayed that they’re almost soil.  But I could tell which was which: the roots were still a bit fibrous, looser than the surrounding soil and a slightly different shade of brown.  Decayed root, I found, was easier to dig, and it didn’t take a gardening genius to realize that mixing that wonderful organic matter with earth would be good for growing things in.

No two trees have exactly the same shape.  Two chipmunks, or two Canada geese, are to the naked eye indistinguishable; nature, having evolved a pattern that works, keeps turning out copies.  Not so with trees.  Or people.

© Marianne Brandis, 2016

Reflections on the Artist's Workplace

“A room of one’s own and five hundred a year” (British 1929 pounds sterling, of course) – that was Virginia Woolf’s famous prescription for enabling women to write.  By a room of one’s own she meant not only the physical space but also the mental freedom to create, and that explains the fact that one of her favourite workspaces was not some secluded sanctuary but a dreadfully cluttered desk in the stockroom at the Hogarth Press, where she and her husband Leonard published books.  That’s encouraging for writers who set up their laptop on the kitchen table or take it to the neighbourhood coffee shop: the room of one’s own can be a mental rather than a physical space.

As for actual rooms of their own – well, artists do their creative work in many kinds of spaces, often not the most private or salubrious.  My workspace is an attic that’s also used for storage; it’s more or less finished but far from fancy, and the arrangements for heating and cooling are makeshift.  The writing area is a three-sided writing surface, of which the main desk is a sheet of plywood laid across two filing cabinets.  On it and the side surfaces are the computer, papers, books, dictionary, and the usual office clutter of pens, pencils, stapler, sticky notes, and so on.  Visual artists often have distinctive and fascinating studios, and sometimes they open them to the public or at least show friends and customers around, but there’s no point in my showing my attic.  There’s nothing to see.  (But, since web pages need visuals, the image given here shows what it looks like.)

Yet, whatever the appearance of these spaces, they are only the physical setting for the enormous, varied, vivid, and complex imaginative and creative life that artists live there and the resonant, multifaceted work that they produce.  Jane Austen writing at a table in the family sitting room, Virginia Woolf in her stockroom, Annie Dillard in her drafty hut on the Pacific coast … what is actually going on in each of those spaces is immense, and even the finished product is only a distillation of the mental and imaginative world that the writer inhabited while writing.  The piece of paper (or the computer screen) on which the words are written, the canvas on which the painter lays the paint – these are windows opening out from the physical workspace into the enormous created place that readers or viewers are invited to share and, by sharing, to use for the enlargement of their own worlds, the enrichment of their own perception and understanding.

The workspaces – mostly modest, often perhaps cramped and shabby – are ludicrously out of proportion to the dimensions of the work created there.

My physical workplace may not be worth showing to anyone, but the mental one – like that of every artist – is always open to the public.

© Marianne Brandis, 2016.