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through a drywall window
Sep. 7th, 2008 09:43 pmI suppose I ought to blame Harold. After all, the purple crayon was his, in that sort of lush, taunting fantasy world that draws kids like me in, and it was perhaps the most literal interpretation of all these rich daylight dreams.
I managed to escape to the Blue Moon twice in a month, a recent record. I drove up first with the friend who will not be named, with a Sprinter filled with T1-11 rough cut engineered plywood siding, rolls of tar paper and asphalt roofing, and other sundries, then again by myself, or rather with my cranky, aging, grossly-overweight pooch panting away in the passenger seat.
On my own, I tend to fall into a luxurious torpor up there, a sort of thousand yard stare that just sort of creeps in—gently, lovingly, like sweet liquor seeping into the sinews. As much as my natural state is a panicked sort of obsessive protestant work ethic, I forgive myself every slip up there, and relish that I still have the potential to stop worrying and learn to love something other than the metaphorical bomb of a mundane day-to-day existence.
This trip, I spent a lot of time looking through a drywall window.
It's not a window, of course. It's just an outline, in pencil, extending the borders of the horrible and permanently-jammed window at the front of the cabin's main room, about which I came to a startling and inexplicably-belated realization just a couple months back—that the sliding "pictshur winda" there is, in reality, a crappy 30x48" sash window, turned on its side by the ruinous "architects" of my lopsided insulbrick burden. I've been pondering options, thinking in vaunted terms of architecture, grousing, experimenting, investigating, and rejecting almost every possibility. After all, making a proper place to shit would be a nice upgrade, or stabilizing the foundation so I don't need a damn funicular to get from the fireplace to the kitchen, or finally repairing the scary room.
Still, having more than one opening window in a 24x24 foot cabin might be nice, and the view…
The friend who will not be named took laughing exception to my fussy and obsessive reluctance to put in a vinyl 48x48 inch sliding window with insulated panes and a screen, pointing out that there really isn't any architecture there to violate with a big square window, and it sort of loosened up the naturalistic builder in me that gets too tied up in dueling built environment orthodoxies. After all, I've been working with organic masonry lately, building hand-formed retaining walls in the museum's garden that get stuccoed and then encrusted with mosaic, and there's something joyous and wonderful in architecture that works like pottery, where right angles are more the exception than the rule. I studied earthship construction for years, way back to when it first started to pick up steam in the early nineties, and though I've had to pull back from my fawning adoration of Michael Reynolds, who's tragically one of those hippie visionaries whose audience fits such a narrow demographic that it turns my stomach, it's still a root of a lot of good thinking about the built environment.
I've been pondering what to do about my little getaway/hunker-down-financial-disaster-refuge, and I've been largely limited by how much things cost, and how little I earn. Building materials are insanely expensive. I've got a leaky place clad half in T1-11 that my dad didn't install properly (no Z channel to stop the water wicking damage) and half in patchy ghetto brick (i.e. asphalt shingle sheeting printed to look like brick), but the cheapest materials to wrap the place still add up to thousands, and I can't go there, but I need to somehow keep the rain out if I'll have anything to hold onto for a time when I won't be so poor.
Inspiring thoughts came along, though, after my recent frustrations with the museum, where I'm told I've spent too much time on the "fun" stuff, which means the work I've done in the garden, and I've felt completely stopped in my tracks by those complaints, and it's made me want to take my skills to places where they're wanted, particularly my outdoor organic design projects. I've got ideas, ideas that build on a lifetime obsession with architecture and sculptural approaches to building a physical space, fed by people like Greene & Greene and Wright and Gaudi and Hundertwasser and Gehry (when Gehry was still great and not a damned overrated flashy desk jockey with 3D modelling software) and Soleri. I've pored over glorious sixties and seventies earth architecture tracts and studied earth sheltered construction, straw bale, rammed-earth, and cob building methods, and just about every other kind of left-field approach to getting a roof over one's head, and—
—and I'm busting my ass to build amazing things for other people, in other places, and getting hollered at for "wasting" my time, and for some reason, I don't quite see how I've so easily slid right back into some kind of lumpen orthodoxy about the Blue Moon with all I've seen. I've been thinking like my dad, for one thing, consciously and unconsciously carrying on his legacy through the dogged observation of his own odd practices and little prejudices, thinking I'd more or less finish off the cabin the way he would have, except he's not here. It is so easy to forget why I love it so much up there, especially when I get frustrated by trying to finish a project I didn't start, using the methods and materials of a man who made four and five times what I make, and that's when I'm lucky enough to surrender to that gorgeous torpor of train time.
The trains come and I sit on the couch, listening to the dog snoring, and I just sit and look through the two panels of the windows Dad put in by the woodstove, where I can see the bristling pods of chestnuts clinging to the branches. I sit and I listen and I see myself picking chestnuts late this fall, prying them out of their prickling armor and wrapping them in foil to roast in the coals in the stove, and this is when the walls start to blossom and shift, bulging and curling in gentle waves of potential.
What if I didn't try to finish the Blue Moon the way my father would have?
What if I wrap part of it in as much T1-11 as I can afford, then clad other parts in soft curves of wood shakes, or salvaged wood from the porch, in forms that burst from the ostensible right angularity of the place, already a laughable delusion, and roll down from the eaves in the forms of moss and water? What if I took the stained glass I saved from the mosaic project, unusable because of color or being mostly clear, or just too plain for the museum, and built little windows here and there, just little pinholes, almost, set almost randomly around the place?
What about clerestory windows in a band across the kitchen, to bring in the gorgeous new green light of the fern-covered hillside behind the place, where the recent timbering brought sunlight for the first time since the forties? The foundation piers I need to build at the downhill side of the place could be straight cement block, smoothed over with undulating mortar and mosaic, reaching up onto the side of the cabin on panels of durock and mosaic, letting the boundaries break and shift, with new structures and curves and angles jutting in new directions.
I think about these things and it lightens the load.
I take a drywall square and a pencil and mark out where I can frame in a great big four foot square sliding window with insulated panes and a screen, for just $125 at the orange place, and it frames the penciled note from 10/29/1991 that reads "ready for skim coat." I sit back to stare through a drywall window, framed in pencil and my clear visualization of how I'll place the new framing, and how I'll detail the outside, and how I'll build a nice, deep sill where I can put a vase and the flowers I find wild on the hillside. I can see the ridgeline on the Maryland side of the river, and the tops of the trees along the train tracks, and the future starts unfurling like new ferns, tight spirals of potential unwinding and spreading out, covering everything in lush new emerald green, washing away the grey of doubt and history, and it is a view that I will cherish for now, even as I know full well it is the portal to a possible world, and just one of many.
I may just get myself a purple pencil to make these marks in the future.
There is so much to do, but the Confucians always maintained that when a man finished building his house, it was time for him to die.
I may just live forever.
In torpor, there's often more. I don't have much money, and probably won't for some time, and I don't have much freedom, at least until I banish the hounds of debt and obligation to a more comfortable distance, and what seemed like a career is probably just a job, just like the rest of them, but even in that, it is my mistaken belief about what I've been working for that has meant something.
It doesn't take a degree in architecture to understand carpentry, masonry, plumbing, metalworking, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits, and I understand more than most, more than a lot of folks who make their living practicing those skills, and I know when to stop the car on the side of the road because I've caught sight of something that may be of use and realized I could very easily strap it on my roof rack and make something of it.
I've been thinking that I don't have much to offer the people I wish would come to West Virginia, to my postage stamp plot of six tenths of an acre, for a weekend of wandering the woods and walking the tracks and swimming and boating in the river (supply your own boat, alas), but I've got a view through a drywall window, where I can see an amazing world, all possible, all there, just ready for the taking when the doubt is weak enough to let the senses rule. I'd hoped to be further along by now, and hosting my friends in sessions of deep-shit storytelling around the fire, but it's been rough, this damned year, and maybe I've been facing doubts of my own.
Already, I'm building a new outhouse, to replace the shambling wreck of the old one—a grand and wonderful outhouse where you'd be happy to spend a while with a good book and a Sears catalogue—if only in my head, but it's coming together, purple lines tracing themselves in my grey matter, over and over, lines crossing, changing, growing brighter as they take on a final form, and I've got a budget for that project that I can afford, barring disaster. These are the times that feel best, when I'm feeling the most gloomy, the most backed-into-a-corner, the most frustrated, because they're the moments when barriers turn to purple crayon, and my stake in the same old same old same old nothing really counts for…nothing.
So I sat and stared through that imaginary window, and the dog snored and the trained roared and wailed and clattered and thunked and the birds sang and a whole myraid of probabilities came twisting out of the fourth dimension, all parallel potentials laid one over another, daydreams in sweet flux, and that's one of those rare moments when I can see it all from that illusory state of torpor, all those lines criss-crossing, whirling, entangling, expanding, all coming from that place in all of us where everything is possible. I envy Harold and that purple crayon, but only until these rare moments come when it is all too clear that each of us could well be something he dreamt up—amazing portraits of possible lives rendered in searing lines of violet, blossoming like improbable and heartbreakingly gorgeous flowers out of West Virginia hillsides just when it really, really feels like everything is altogether hopeless.
Just now, I need to fix my car, to tend the home fires, and get my eyes examined, but my pencil is ready, and I've got tools and skills and stacks of stuff I've saved for possible architectures.
Stay with this.
Stay.
I managed to escape to the Blue Moon twice in a month, a recent record. I drove up first with the friend who will not be named, with a Sprinter filled with T1-11 rough cut engineered plywood siding, rolls of tar paper and asphalt roofing, and other sundries, then again by myself, or rather with my cranky, aging, grossly-overweight pooch panting away in the passenger seat.
On my own, I tend to fall into a luxurious torpor up there, a sort of thousand yard stare that just sort of creeps in—gently, lovingly, like sweet liquor seeping into the sinews. As much as my natural state is a panicked sort of obsessive protestant work ethic, I forgive myself every slip up there, and relish that I still have the potential to stop worrying and learn to love something other than the metaphorical bomb of a mundane day-to-day existence.
This trip, I spent a lot of time looking through a drywall window.
It's not a window, of course. It's just an outline, in pencil, extending the borders of the horrible and permanently-jammed window at the front of the cabin's main room, about which I came to a startling and inexplicably-belated realization just a couple months back—that the sliding "pictshur winda" there is, in reality, a crappy 30x48" sash window, turned on its side by the ruinous "architects" of my lopsided insulbrick burden. I've been pondering options, thinking in vaunted terms of architecture, grousing, experimenting, investigating, and rejecting almost every possibility. After all, making a proper place to shit would be a nice upgrade, or stabilizing the foundation so I don't need a damn funicular to get from the fireplace to the kitchen, or finally repairing the scary room.
Still, having more than one opening window in a 24x24 foot cabin might be nice, and the view…
The friend who will not be named took laughing exception to my fussy and obsessive reluctance to put in a vinyl 48x48 inch sliding window with insulated panes and a screen, pointing out that there really isn't any architecture there to violate with a big square window, and it sort of loosened up the naturalistic builder in me that gets too tied up in dueling built environment orthodoxies. After all, I've been working with organic masonry lately, building hand-formed retaining walls in the museum's garden that get stuccoed and then encrusted with mosaic, and there's something joyous and wonderful in architecture that works like pottery, where right angles are more the exception than the rule. I studied earthship construction for years, way back to when it first started to pick up steam in the early nineties, and though I've had to pull back from my fawning adoration of Michael Reynolds, who's tragically one of those hippie visionaries whose audience fits such a narrow demographic that it turns my stomach, it's still a root of a lot of good thinking about the built environment.
I've been pondering what to do about my little getaway/hunker-down-financial-disaster-refuge, and I've been largely limited by how much things cost, and how little I earn. Building materials are insanely expensive. I've got a leaky place clad half in T1-11 that my dad didn't install properly (no Z channel to stop the water wicking damage) and half in patchy ghetto brick (i.e. asphalt shingle sheeting printed to look like brick), but the cheapest materials to wrap the place still add up to thousands, and I can't go there, but I need to somehow keep the rain out if I'll have anything to hold onto for a time when I won't be so poor.
Inspiring thoughts came along, though, after my recent frustrations with the museum, where I'm told I've spent too much time on the "fun" stuff, which means the work I've done in the garden, and I've felt completely stopped in my tracks by those complaints, and it's made me want to take my skills to places where they're wanted, particularly my outdoor organic design projects. I've got ideas, ideas that build on a lifetime obsession with architecture and sculptural approaches to building a physical space, fed by people like Greene & Greene and Wright and Gaudi and Hundertwasser and Gehry (when Gehry was still great and not a damned overrated flashy desk jockey with 3D modelling software) and Soleri. I've pored over glorious sixties and seventies earth architecture tracts and studied earth sheltered construction, straw bale, rammed-earth, and cob building methods, and just about every other kind of left-field approach to getting a roof over one's head, and—
—and I'm busting my ass to build amazing things for other people, in other places, and getting hollered at for "wasting" my time, and for some reason, I don't quite see how I've so easily slid right back into some kind of lumpen orthodoxy about the Blue Moon with all I've seen. I've been thinking like my dad, for one thing, consciously and unconsciously carrying on his legacy through the dogged observation of his own odd practices and little prejudices, thinking I'd more or less finish off the cabin the way he would have, except he's not here. It is so easy to forget why I love it so much up there, especially when I get frustrated by trying to finish a project I didn't start, using the methods and materials of a man who made four and five times what I make, and that's when I'm lucky enough to surrender to that gorgeous torpor of train time.
The trains come and I sit on the couch, listening to the dog snoring, and I just sit and look through the two panels of the windows Dad put in by the woodstove, where I can see the bristling pods of chestnuts clinging to the branches. I sit and I listen and I see myself picking chestnuts late this fall, prying them out of their prickling armor and wrapping them in foil to roast in the coals in the stove, and this is when the walls start to blossom and shift, bulging and curling in gentle waves of potential.
What if I didn't try to finish the Blue Moon the way my father would have?
What if I wrap part of it in as much T1-11 as I can afford, then clad other parts in soft curves of wood shakes, or salvaged wood from the porch, in forms that burst from the ostensible right angularity of the place, already a laughable delusion, and roll down from the eaves in the forms of moss and water? What if I took the stained glass I saved from the mosaic project, unusable because of color or being mostly clear, or just too plain for the museum, and built little windows here and there, just little pinholes, almost, set almost randomly around the place?
What about clerestory windows in a band across the kitchen, to bring in the gorgeous new green light of the fern-covered hillside behind the place, where the recent timbering brought sunlight for the first time since the forties? The foundation piers I need to build at the downhill side of the place could be straight cement block, smoothed over with undulating mortar and mosaic, reaching up onto the side of the cabin on panels of durock and mosaic, letting the boundaries break and shift, with new structures and curves and angles jutting in new directions.
I think about these things and it lightens the load.
I take a drywall square and a pencil and mark out where I can frame in a great big four foot square sliding window with insulated panes and a screen, for just $125 at the orange place, and it frames the penciled note from 10/29/1991 that reads "ready for skim coat." I sit back to stare through a drywall window, framed in pencil and my clear visualization of how I'll place the new framing, and how I'll detail the outside, and how I'll build a nice, deep sill where I can put a vase and the flowers I find wild on the hillside. I can see the ridgeline on the Maryland side of the river, and the tops of the trees along the train tracks, and the future starts unfurling like new ferns, tight spirals of potential unwinding and spreading out, covering everything in lush new emerald green, washing away the grey of doubt and history, and it is a view that I will cherish for now, even as I know full well it is the portal to a possible world, and just one of many.
I may just get myself a purple pencil to make these marks in the future.
There is so much to do, but the Confucians always maintained that when a man finished building his house, it was time for him to die.
I may just live forever.
In torpor, there's often more. I don't have much money, and probably won't for some time, and I don't have much freedom, at least until I banish the hounds of debt and obligation to a more comfortable distance, and what seemed like a career is probably just a job, just like the rest of them, but even in that, it is my mistaken belief about what I've been working for that has meant something.
It doesn't take a degree in architecture to understand carpentry, masonry, plumbing, metalworking, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits, and I understand more than most, more than a lot of folks who make their living practicing those skills, and I know when to stop the car on the side of the road because I've caught sight of something that may be of use and realized I could very easily strap it on my roof rack and make something of it.
I've been thinking that I don't have much to offer the people I wish would come to West Virginia, to my postage stamp plot of six tenths of an acre, for a weekend of wandering the woods and walking the tracks and swimming and boating in the river (supply your own boat, alas), but I've got a view through a drywall window, where I can see an amazing world, all possible, all there, just ready for the taking when the doubt is weak enough to let the senses rule. I'd hoped to be further along by now, and hosting my friends in sessions of deep-shit storytelling around the fire, but it's been rough, this damned year, and maybe I've been facing doubts of my own.
Already, I'm building a new outhouse, to replace the shambling wreck of the old one—a grand and wonderful outhouse where you'd be happy to spend a while with a good book and a Sears catalogue—if only in my head, but it's coming together, purple lines tracing themselves in my grey matter, over and over, lines crossing, changing, growing brighter as they take on a final form, and I've got a budget for that project that I can afford, barring disaster. These are the times that feel best, when I'm feeling the most gloomy, the most backed-into-a-corner, the most frustrated, because they're the moments when barriers turn to purple crayon, and my stake in the same old same old same old nothing really counts for…nothing.
So I sat and stared through that imaginary window, and the dog snored and the trained roared and wailed and clattered and thunked and the birds sang and a whole myraid of probabilities came twisting out of the fourth dimension, all parallel potentials laid one over another, daydreams in sweet flux, and that's one of those rare moments when I can see it all from that illusory state of torpor, all those lines criss-crossing, whirling, entangling, expanding, all coming from that place in all of us where everything is possible. I envy Harold and that purple crayon, but only until these rare moments come when it is all too clear that each of us could well be something he dreamt up—amazing portraits of possible lives rendered in searing lines of violet, blossoming like improbable and heartbreakingly gorgeous flowers out of West Virginia hillsides just when it really, really feels like everything is altogether hopeless.
Just now, I need to fix my car, to tend the home fires, and get my eyes examined, but my pencil is ready, and I've got tools and skills and stacks of stuff I've saved for possible architectures.
Stay with this.
Stay.
