Mirror on back wall

Made this 28? years ago when living on Block Island, from the broken shards of a mirror. It is on the north side of the house.

kitchen counter table top

this is from a chunk of bowling alley…. from Captain Nick’s on Block Island
wrapped in cherry from the bar at the Thrush Tavern

the eschaton flag

designed by Bill Stringfellow and myself
made by Cathy Payne, of Block Island

love, fish, scales of justice, the word
cross with a crown of juggling balls
at the center

paint station

where I painted the puzzle pieces
the wood is actually from a hunk
of bowling alley that I drove up
from Block Island on top of my
VW beetle in 1984

seagulls puzzle sketch

something old, something new, something blue

There was a time when I could pick up any object, stare at any thing, think about anything, and soon enough it would reveal itself to me, it’s self being evidence of life, role, meaning, tracings, connections — a small stone on a beach on Block Island — I would hold it in my hand, round, smooth, a particular weight and color, density, hardness, and I would start to feel/see/imagine the motions of the waves, the sand, the stone being rolled and knocked, rolled and knocked, for years, decades, since before I was born, for centuries ? — made smooth and polished, this one stone. And I’d think of the time when it was part of some larger stone, some rough chunk of rock, being crushed by the weight of ice, being pushed and rolled, pushed and rolled, the way I used to walk and kick a can in front of me, but slowly, inches a year, the can-kicking, can-crushing slow-motion glaciers of the last ice age which scoured the ancient rocky mountains of what we call New England, decapitating, breaking, crunching, crushing. Water crushing stone. Flowing ice shaping mountains, flattening, rounding, smoothing, reducing, reducing.

You can see where this leads. This little stone, warming in my hand, round, blue, polished, was once part of some great mass of solid rock mountain jutting up into the sky. This one little stone has a story tens of thousands, millions (?) of years old – as do every one of the other stones that lie on this beach. And the story keeps stretching back, elastic, to the forming of the mountain, its lifting, to the great floating plates of the earth’s crust, colliding and crushing, lifting and diving, back to the formation of the crust itself, when the planet was young and hot, molten, when the rock was on fire and flowing, and still further, back to the formation of the planet itself, and even this goes back, to the death of a star, some particular star that we shall never see, never find in the night sky, some very particular star that died, that in a final paroxysm of light and heat, collapsed into itself in a great fury of fusion which forced all those light elements like hydrogen and helium with their single and double proton nucleuses and one little shell of one or two electrons to jam together and form the wide fat spread of heavy rocky elements, great chunks of stone and metal, some of which formed themselves into a great sphere which found itself spinning around some new, young, baby star.

Do you realize that the elements in that stone in your hand are older than the solar system? Older than the sun? That the elements that make up the earth are older and heavier than the sun’s? What we think of as the earth was once a vast debris field drifting loosely in space. The heavy molecules that comprise the stone in your hand were once in that debris field. But that is also true of the hand that holds the stone, your warm hand, the molecules in your finger bones, your skin, your blood, transmuted, cooked, reformed, thrown up as flesh, your atoms too were once in that debris field, which means that your electrons were once spinning happy and hot in that particular star, not just any star, not some star, not a generalized star, but that particular star, the one we will never see in the night, because we are it.

Nowadays the question is, what else does that mean, if anything? Does it matter that we are all, in some real sense, one? That we are all made of the same stuff, and that the stuff is really old? So what? Does it help us live together? Live well? Or is it just a fluffy thought that runs through your mind when you pick up a stone?

first puzzle

made this in 1983, while on Block Island,
living with Stringfellow.

Block Island seaweed

October, 2008 Block Island, RI Daniel Wetmore

Friends of Franz

You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait, be quite still and alone.
The world will come to you and let you
take off its mask.
It has no other choice.

These words, and the name Kafka were typed neatly on the back side of an index card and pinned to the wall in Herb’s kitchen. Herb lived “off the grid” in a borrowed house beyond a dead end road in a brush overgrown section of Block Island Rhode Island, in a place that no day-tripping moped rider or tax-assessor would ever find. He would leave his home every day, to go to Ernie’s Diner or the airport restaurant, the harbor, the post office, and once a week or so, the dump.

His house, which really belonged to an old time islander who owned the marina down at New Harbor, a man who hired him to do design work from time to time, was filled with furniture of all sorts, books, and all manner of interesting objects. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, engineering and reference books, books on art, history, biography, philosophy; old toys, strange tools, and well-oiled implements.

He had a large room filled with dressers and shelves all covered and filled with tools. Before I left the island he took me there to give me a hammer head as a parting gift. Every drawer of every dresser was filled with clean, oiled metal objects; one with files, one with rasps, another with screwdrivers, the old kind, a single spike of heavy iron with smooth rounded wood pieces fitted on either side for a handle.

“People throw these away,” he would say. “I find them at the dump. They are perfectly good. They just need a little filing to clean up the edge, and new wood pieces for the handle. I clean them and oil them. I’m not sure why.” One of the dressers was filled, every drawer, with assorted hammers and hammer heads; metal working, leatherworking, woodworking. He reached into a drawer filled with 16 ounce finishing hammer heads and handed one to me. “You might find this useful. You’ll need to make a handle for it. And put a little oil on it once in a while. It will keep it from rusting.”

Almost everything in his house came from the dump, even his fuel for the winter which was mostly construction debris. He was an engineer and designer and had built a beautiful and original windmill using sails and wood and nylon and bearings and car batteries — all from the dump. It was a work of art and turned smoothly, elegantly in the air above his workshop. The only thing it lacked was the inverter that would turn the spinning motion into electricity and charge the batteries. He knew where the inverter was, on the floor behind the desk at the car mechanic’s shop. His windmill waited patiently, for years, weathering in the sun and rain, its sails neatly coiled. “It will show up,” he said, “eventually, everything goes to the dump.”

One day Herb and I were visiting a mutual friend. We walked into his well-appointed living room, filled with matching, expensive furniture, shelves of sophisticated books, and artwork on the walls. Herb moved into the center and surveyed the room silently for a few moments and then announced, with almost sorrowful irony, “Someday this will all be mine.”

He found a letter from the Harpers Ferry insurrectionist John Brown at the dump. The Reverend Vail, an abolitionist minister who lived on the island in the 1800’s had corresponded with Brown while he was in prison awaiting execution. When the Vail homestead was finally torn down in the 1960’s the new owners sent boxes of old papers and items to the dump, consigned to its weekly bonfire. Herb found the letter before the fire did. “It was one of the last things John Brown wrote. I sold it to a collector for $300. I have always regretted that.”

Before he came to the island Herb had helped design the first shopping mall in the US, in Michigan I think, built in the ‘50’s He still had the blueprints and laid them out for me one day. He designed a toy, called it the Ubi, for ubiquitous, but the company that bought his idea changed it to Oobi, “more friendly,” they said. It was a “note in a bottle adrift in a sea of people,” made of hollow plastic, the size of an egg, only flattened somewhat, with a narrow slit for the insertion of a note, and a blank flat space where the sender would write the name and city or town of the intended recipient, ideally someone who lived far away, on an opposite coast or on a different continent — not the address, just the town, and country or general area. The sender would give the Oobi to someone who was headed in the direction of the recipient, who would then pass it on to the next person who was traveling farther, and so on, hand to hand, hitchhiking. “It’s not about the note,” he said, “but about the conversations, the connections, the long string of strangers that would meet and pass the Oobi along.” They paid him $7000 for the idea and spent another $10,000 developing it, but they didn’t produce it. At the end, if the Oobi ever reaches its destination, the recipient will need to break it to get the note out. The marketing people couldn’t swallow that. They didn’t think anyone would buy something that had to be broken in order to be used. He showed me the mock magazine ads he made to sell the idea. a little Oobi hiding behind a rock on a photo of the moon’s surface, on a VW dashboard, poking out of a hip pocket. “They didn’t get it,” he said, “they never understood the idea.” He showed me his prototypes, a few in wood, one in plastic. They were international orange with two big white eyes outlined in black. He put them back on table, next to a collection of antique toys and puzzles he had found at the dump.

He virtually never left the island, except I think, to die. He never got the inverter. He used to point at his kitchen table and chair and radio. “I’ve sat in that chair for over 25 years, Dan. The same chair. Same table. The same radio. The entire Viet Nam war, happened while I sat there listening to it, on the radio.

Herb was an Ubi who didn’t travel, a bottle who washed up on Block Island and never left. His messages, from Kafka and others, were pinned to the kitchen wall and read only by the small handful of guests ever invited in. The world did come to him, through the radio, the dump, in the broken seminarian who trapsed through his rooms. Whether it really let him take off any masks is debatable. He found things and used them and was good at salvage. He was largely alone. He cared about the world and could get very indignant about venality and stupidity and waste. He was an artist and a thinker. He gave me one more thing before I ended my two year retreat and moved to Vermont. An index card with a quote from Machiavelli, the Prince. He was worried about me, thought me too idealistic, too earnest, too sensitive (too much like himself). This is what it said:

the gap is often great between how one does live and how one ought to live
and the person who neglects what is done
for the sake of what ought to be done
learns the path to destruction, rather than preservation;
for a person who wishes to act virtuously at all times
necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

That quote, and Kafka’s, and a 16 ounce hammer head (which I did make a handle for) have stayed with me and served me well. Thank you Herb.

the breezeway

Bill had a “breezeway,” that’s what he called it, a narrow space between the house and what was originally the garage — about five feet wide and fifteen feet long. The previous owner had converted the garage into an office with large plate glass windows where the garage doors had been and had enclosed the breezeway in a glass and aluminum contraption with a storm door on either end. If the back door of the breezeway was unlatched and you opened the front it was likely that the back would suddenly swing outward with the wind that whipped up from the harbor. The doors would bang and clatter and you could hear the sucking and wheezing of the hydraulic closers as they fought the gusts and tried to pull themselves shut