a fifth approach: mes boîtes

here's is what the bird told the sleeping beauty after the fire. he says it in his own language and she dreams it:

there is something evocative about all the shoe boxes left in the house last may in hinton after the arsonist's fire consumed the back wall, and the fire department’s dowsing of the flames that took off much of the roof. this brought on a game of ordering. i've loved boxes since i first saw amal and the night visitors as a child: so these are my boxes. across my life, i have had a series of boxes that i filled with special objects. i had numbered the first 3, and then created dated shoe boxes of the objects that had collected on my desk. the later boxes included unfinished projects as well as bits of the world that i had picked up from the street.

i was amused to see some objects appear in several boxes: a whispered language. i gathered the boxes from the floor of the neighboring house, where they dried out over the summer. some fell apart and had to be placed in other boxes. i brought the mess back to stephen and liz's basement and explored them there. i got a few new shoe boxes and created a series of nine boxes, playfully putting bits away and moving a few objects from one box to the next, making little notes as I borrowed things from one time period and tucked them into another. at first it seemed unlikely that i could contain the material. some things seemed too wide or bulky. over the course of five days, i arranged all the pieces into what became nine boxes. some pieces fit inside others. once i finished, i took a series of photographs to make a "slide shoe show."

the boxes will eventually join the series of journals i keep. a few objects in each box may move into other boxes to complete what i had set out to make, but didn't complete. a few characters made of neckties might benefit from metal bits that would nicely weigh their limbs. things like that enter the creative process. i write some text on the lid interior and delight to find that i have done this in the past as well. i imagine adding notes in the future.

the pipe cleaner little man that naomi schiff made for my fifth birthday april 1960 has his bed in a mexican dish that came from the house on andrews lane when we moved in oct 1974. i can count out my life ...