Editorial
I was sitting in the living room yesterday as the light waned on a lovely September afternoon, thinking vaguely about the evening to follow, what I might do today, knowing above all else that I must write this editorial and wondering what I would find to say, when my eye came to rest on the vase on the hearth. It’s a pottery vase, oval in shape and glazed a sea-glass green that fades to stone as it flattens towards the base and neck. I’ve had it a long time. I did the sum in my head – eighteen years since Mr Nihei, head of the Nishi-Aizu education department, gave it to me as a thank you / farewell present a few days before I left Japan. He was a tiny man, without much hair (unusually for the Japanese), pristine and sharp, who spoke so fast I never understood what he was saying.
The vase suits flowers, particularly spring flowers, tulips and daffodils, but I love it on its own as well. Why, I’m not quite sure – there’s something about the relationship of shape and size and colour that feels satisfying and complete. The eye rests, the heart opens, the mind returns to itself at ease. Those cryptic lines from Marvell’s poem, ‘The Garden’, occur to me, ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’, and now when I read the poem again after several years, I’m very struck by the first verse:
How vainly men themselves amaze ?
To win the palm, the oak, or bays; ?
And their uncessant labors see ?
Crowned from some single herb or tree, ?
Whose short and narrow-vergèd shade ?
Does prudently their toils upbraid; ?
While all the flowers and trees do close ?
To weave the garlands of repose.
It chimes, albeit tangentially, with things I was thinking yesterday as my eye rested on my vase and I wondered in a vague way what I should write today. There is so much writing in the world, so much publishing, so much ‘communication’ – newspapers, books, magazines, theses, blogs, emails, advertisements – and so many people jostling to be read and recognised. Whatever happened to the ethos of the medieval masons who carved out beauty in the high dark places of cathedrals where only God looked on? Many no longer believe in God, but does that leave art nothing but the marketplace to please? And why should I, why should a little magazine like Brittle Star add to all these words?
The mind likes metaphors, likes making connections. I thought about writing, how, at its best, it feels like a process of the mind returning to itself, listening to the heart, its tremors and vibrations, and shaping these into poems, stories, essays that exist, like an oval vase or a garland of flowers, beyond the individual who created them. Brittle Star hopes to give space to these things, combinations of words that offer joy, discovery, a place of contemplation, that move and amuse us and refresh us when we return to them. That’s it, I thought, as I got up to turn on the light, that’s the place to start, and lest I forget, there in the dark I wrote the words in silver on a piece of paper: I have a vase.
Page(s) 2-3
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