The Jewel Box
#2 Keepers of the Silver Phial, The Physics of Gene Clark, Drawing Horses, and the Well that Fills from Beneath.
Phials
They come in forms as infinite as imagination. In cut crystal, pressed glass, carved of a single piece of amethyst into an inquisitive bird. Shaped like a drinking horn, a genie’s sexy lamp, or in distinctly feminine curves that arch their backs up to a bough of ornate flowers at the cap. They are stoppered, corked, and topped with centered gems like the pommels of swords. They can bottle up strange brews of any kind: perfume, potion, poison. I’ve loved them dearly all my life.
Since childhood I have been reaching out for and turning over in my hands every small, interesting container I could find: little wooden boxes, pale green soapstone bowls with fitted lids, empty tins of french candies, colorful cardboard matchboxes. The ornamental debris of my life is a little matroyshka, to be honest. Tiny receptacles stored inside progressively bigger ones and shoved under my bed until the moment comes and they are called on for their true purpose. To hold something for which they are, by reasons of dimension or vibe, uniquely suited.
Aging is like a great trade bazaar, in which a new year of your life walks up to your table and claims a few more units of collagen and a few more of your favored delusions. As those are removed, you get to see more of the big picture of your life. It’s there, a coherent landscape painted on the tabletop like the puzzle box lid. That’s your payment. So many of my own qualities make sense to me now in this larger picture, including this attraction to pretty little bottles. Sure, I love ornamental objects for their own sake, the more art nouveau the better, but that’s not what gives me the actual thrill. It’s the possibility. I’m obsessed with possibility. A veritable truffle pig for it. Possibility: potential and hope, uncut and potent. I can smell it a mile away.
The beautiful bottle allows me a little defined shape to work with when I dream of how to fill it. Here is the boundary, now create the contents. Will it be dandelion wine, brilliant sun-yellow with the tender bloom of spring? Take a sip when you’re snowed in, it’ll get you through to the thaw. Will it be jasmine or ylang ylang perfume? A single sniff will knock you brain into a narcotic swoon for a suspended second: turns out something primordial in us comprehends the reproductive life of flowers more than we think we do. And so on.
It can - can! - hold so many beautiful things. Much like…a jewel box?
This Song That Mentions a Phial:
Or, why I spelled it that way in #1 above, obviously. The spelling also sounds more like something Morgan Le Fay would use, tucked away in a hip pocket.
This album is one of the handful I wouldn’t hesitate to call perfect. Hardly a controversial opinion but it should be said as often as possible. No Other is a masterpiece. It’s not that it’s my favorite type of music. I don’t even think of it in connection with anything else I listen to, or try to make. It’s simply entirely itself: constructed to support from within by perfect principles and execution. It’s the musical equivalent of how the laws of physics contain internal integrity that can be applied: an arch will hold up a dome. No Other holds us in its grip for its duration, incontrovertibly, and the dome of heaven is made visible above.
This is not a cold mathematics, though. Every supporting beam is built of pure feeling. It helps that he is also an emotional sorcerer who fills those spaces with a keening, bittersweet heartbreak. Yet somehow you emerge stronger instead of depleted? Alchemical mercury.
“Strength of Strings” is probably my favorite song on the album, but there’s no need to choose on an album like this.
Drawing Made Easy:
Speaking of forms and shapes, I’ve been trying to regain a little more skill in drawing lately. Not to illustrate per se, but for other visual art I’m working on (currently embossing and embroidery). When I was a kid I drew freely and occasionally well. It’s easy to get rusty and awkward in it again, and I’m also very impatient when it comes to two-dimensional art. Or any art. I love the concept stage - possibility! - and the later, fine-tuning stage. In music this means I love the initial writing of the song above all: the arches of melody, the emotional punch of a great transition. I also love the overdubs, the vocal harmonies, synths, flutes, 8th guitar riff. I am impatient and easily frustrated with nailing the exact proper foundation of the middle - the solid shape - as any bandmates and engineers will attest.
I tried to draw a horse recently from memory and my god, the framed elementary art at my parent’s house was better. So I went looking for help with firming up the solid shapes, that I may race on quickly to the pleasure of shading in the whorls on the unicorn horn.
I found this book and it is a delight in so many ways. Fully scanned and available on the internet, as things were in those idealistic early days of the world wide web. It was going to be such a great, democratic resource for us all! A library of Alexandria, flickering in the ether. Anyway. Here is this book from 1921, showing the forms and shapes behind rabbits and flowers, so wholesome and helpful. The books scans show the wear on the book, which reminds me in a good way about the tactile pleasure of actual objects. Free, worn, moving through time. Something taken, something gained. Beautiful.
Drawing Made Easy by E.G. Lutz
Annie Dillard’s Writing Advice:
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for another place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have earned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
From The Writing Life, 1989
This quote hits like a bolt. Its origin, The Writing Life, is short and magnificent with wisdom, each line delivered with a punch of power and truth. It’s about writing, yes, but this applies to all things. Give of yourself and more of yourself is created in the process. It takes enormous faith and some courage. For myself, I am frequently haunted by the feeling that time is limited. Sometimes it overwhelms me and I want to go fetal for a while to cope with the wave of regret. But there’s another edge to this sword: there is no time to lose. Use everything you have and trust more will come as you keep your eye on the horizon. “Give it, give it all, give it now”.
“Something more will arise for later, something better.”