Hey!
Hey friends,
As the drumbeat of promotion for Endpapers slows down, I find myself seeking quiet, looking forward even more than usual to my early-morning writing sessions, scribbling away in my notebook with no social media to distract me, reading a few pages every night before bed from One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the novels that fed my love of literature as a college student.
This past weekend my brother-in-law and his two daughters came to town, and we took them to the Corning Museum of Glass and the Rockwell Museum. I’ve been to both before. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been to the glass museum. So I underestimated how inspiring these places could still be.
Walking around the galleries in the museum of glass, I saw many pieces I hadn’t seen before, including a whole exhibit on paperweights of the world. As a bookbinder and former paper maker, I’ve always loved everything related to paper and book art, and I have a few lovely weights I use in my bindery, but somehow the paperweight as an everyday object never made an impression on me until I saw so many together.
The weights in the exhibit were mostly round, but the range of interior designs was fascinating, from abstract to floral to royal to hypnotic. Some had snakes coiled on top! It was extremely delightful to imagine people all over the world being moved to design beautiful objects to hold their paper in place. It reminded me that we’re a species that craves beauty or meaning even in the mundane, and I love that about us.
At the Rockwell, I was tired and my feet hurt, but I saw a painting that had caught my eye on a previous visit and paused to look at it up close. The painting, which I realized is actually mixed-media and collage, is Hey! by Benny Andrews. It depicts a man sitting at a piano with his fingers flying through the air and his head thrown back like he’s feeling the music. This time I noticed that his hands don’t come close to touching the keys, however, and it made the piano seem like a mere prop, like the music was being made by the man himself or being created through him.
Because I slowed down to observe the work more closely, I also paid more attention to the title. Alone, the word reads like a small, punchy lyric or a quick call for attention, but the plaque next to the painting gives more context: “Hey! (The Langston Hughes Series).” So I made note of Langston Hughes and Googled him to see what poem Andrews had been responding to.
What I found was not one but two poems — one titled “Hey!” in which a person sings about the blues coming on as the sun sets, and another titled “Hey! Hey!” in which they release the blues as the sun rises. But I didn’t stop there. I also found more poems by Hughes in which the significance of the word “hey” is deeply felt, as in “Brass Spittoons,” where he repeats the words “Hey, boy!” as part of a command to clean the spittoons.
I’m no art historian or poet or scholar, but the way this moved me — this conversation across media and time between artists who not only craved beauty and meaning but also had important things to say — reminded me how deep our need to connect really runs, to connect with both one another and all our shared and unshared experiences. And what I love most about art is its unique power to allow us to do that.
So, I guess my point this week is that writing is not always the best way to advance your writing. Sometimes we need to refill the well with inspiration from other artists, whether it’s appreciating how people all over the globe weigh their paper down (in style) or rushing to find a poem because a painting called you to.
Whatever you’re up to this week, I hope you’re finding ways to refill your well and make meaningful connections. I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
Yours,
Jen