Part Five***EARTHSHINE There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always the something you were after. —J.R.R. Tolkien Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. —Horace Mann, 1796–1859 The door to the cramped office was locked. The appointment card read 3 p.m. The wall clock in the waiting area said 3:10. We knocked. With a jerk, it flew open. A man stepped out. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt, pale tie, he looked out of place amid the careless exuberance of a college campus. “Come in,” he said with a reassuring, jovial smile. “Sorry about the locked door. Human resources rules, you know. Let’s start. You have an hour. Don’t want time to get away.” He slid his business card across the table: “Retirement Planning.” The computer behind him ticked off the minutes like a basketball scoreboard clock. He had questions. “What do you need?” “What is essential?” “How much time remains?” The first two were easy. The last unanswerable. Sixty minutes later we made our way across campus in the gathering gloom to the car. Where had the time gone? Not the hour, the decades. I found myself thinking about Mrs. Merrifield’s lamp. *** I was 22 years old. It was our first apartment. The previous tenant, a gentle white-haired woman, was moving to a retirement home. She left behind one table lamp in the center of the living room floor. Attached was a note in a spidery hand. “Consider this a gift.” The lamp was like Mrs. Merrifield herself — the green and gold base worn and faded, the shade not quite level. But it worked. It was the first household item we owned. Years passed. More lamps appeared. Mrs. Merrifield’s gift, outclassed and obsolete, ended up in the trash. According to the black suit, the things we accumulated might be difficult. A minefield to manage. To maintain. I didn’t think so. Material things aren’t the problem. Knowing when to let go is the problem. I learned that from painting. Time was another story. *** I acquired a large collection of books and magazines on arts and crafts over the years. The china ones often begin with lists — “Materials Used for Painting on Porcelain.” What follows are 40 or so items before they get to kiln requirements. Catalogues offer as many as 60 different brushes. Hundreds of colors. Thousands of blank objects to paint. China shows and exhibitions feature earnest sellers offering a dizzy array of items “painters can’t do without.” I ended up with potions, bottles, boxes, tools I couldn’t identify, much less use. Vendors extolled the virtues of one color “house” over another. I bought vials from many. Soon I had 14 rose shades, 20 reds, 19 browns, even six grays. I couldn’t keep track. Lugging my supplies to class took several trips. *** After painting for some years I stumbled on an instructional video on the internet by Barbara Duncan. Duncan, a world-famous oil as well as china painter, was demonstrating “peace roses.” What surprised me was her palette. Nine colors. She mixed everything from them. She used three brushes — a squirrel shader with a flat square top, a long thin scroller, and a small berry brush. “Of course, these take practice,” she said. “Don’t be discouraged. Keep on.” She was talking about roses. I was thinking about tools. I reduced my painting supplies by half. It was easier to carry, to choose, to create, to clean up. I experimented. I improvised. I deviated from suggested design palettes. *** Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, wrote his famous “The Cat in the Hat” with 236 words after reading a 1954 article in Life Magazine asking why children’s stories were so complicated. Afterwards, his publisher, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 he couldn’t write a story with 50 words. Cerf lost. Geisel wrote “Green Eggs and Ham.” It remains one of the four best-selling children’s books in the world. Less became more. Michael Masterson and Malcolm Gladwell are contemporary writers about achievement. Masterson says it takes at least 1,000 hours of practice to get past incompetence in anything. At 5,000 hours one becomes competent. He agrees with Gladwell’s assertion in “The Outliers” — mastery comes after 10,000 hours. 2010 marked 10 years of china painting. Ten years: to borrow from Pascal, nearly nothing in relation to infinity, nearly everything in relation to nothing. By Masterson and Gladwell’s reckoning I am a little more than halfway to competence as a china painter. How much time do we have left? The man in the black suit, surrounded by actuarial tables and charts, couldn’t be sure. Nor could his locked door keep time from slipping away like pale winter sun on a cloudy afternoon. Sort. Simplify. Substitute. Good advice for painting. For writing. For the material world. Time is different. There will never be enough. Artists and writers don’t stop time. They do make it easier to see it. With fewer tools I concentrate on what I am painting, not what I am painting with. I waste less time rummaging for lost items. I’ve gained more — time to revisit favorite subjects. Reread favorite books. My paint box is lighter. My house is cleaner. A man in black asked questions. A painter had some answers. Reduce. Restrict. Refine. A poet had the rest: The painter Harlan Hubbard said / That he was painting Heaven when / The places he painted merely were / The Campbell or the Trimble County / Banks of the Ohio, or farms / And hills where he had worked or roamed: / A house’s gable or roofline / Rising from a fold in the hills / Trees bearing snow, two shanty boats / At dawn, immortal light upon / The flowing river in its bends. And these were Heavenly because / He never saw them clear enough / To satisfy his love, his need / To see them all again, again. —Wendell Berry, “Sabbath XV, 2005” River Journeys is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to River Journeys at anneayerskoch.substack.com/subscribe
