Can you have art without crumbs?

On the anonymous markings of strangers.

In the Vancouver Art Gallery, in a white exhibition room, there is a singular and narrow table. An art book is set at each chair. There are place settings of nude photography and textile art commemorating departures.

Above the table is a string with white slips of paper. People have penciled poems and drawings. The anonymous markings of strangers. I don’t often come across these, not without a digital footprint of some kind. I step closer. All this art laid out and the table tricked this flock of strangers into thinking about food: “I don’t write poetry. I like garlic bread.” (Me too.) “Chezburger. CHEEZEBURGER. Chezzburger.” An image of two tea cups cheersing. It is strange, isn’t it? To have art in a sterile and silent and crumbless places.

I tell my friend that I don’t know how editors hold on to hope in the news cycle. She says this was discussed in climate writing. Doom isn’t practical, or even helpful.

Tamio Wakayama photographed a sign for BREAD, SALT AND WATER and underneath it those three mercies are on a singular round table dressed in a white tablecloth in another white room with innumerable pews, or school benches, roughly arranged around the table and not a human in sight except me, in the reflection, hungry.

Wakayama was photographing the minority Doukhobor community and in his black-and-white pictures their old men and women are translucent. Like an exhale could vanish them. Are bread, salt, and water also disappearing?

I am tired. Rain hitting wave tired. Leather shoes unpolished on salted sidewalks tired. Dollar-store chapstick on cracked lips tired.

This morning my throat itched in its healing and I coughed and the reflex launched water out of my mouth – a clear arc, a mistake that could not be taken back.

Maybe, Will says, keeping sanity in the news isn’t about forgiveness but about transcendence. I had asked Will about forgiveness. I think my questions are growing too big for me.

The art gallery restaurant is overpriced and they never bring me the tea I ordered. I escape the exhibition and the exhibition’s restaurant with no salt. On the corner of the street, in the rain, I stop for beef samosas from a food truck. While they fry, I do a little dance because my bus is leaving me behind.

It is raining and raining and I am breathing and the only way I know to make art is to spill water and let it dry and spill water and let it dry and let water carry some colour in its arms each time and step back and see what accidents, taken together, make. •

I have never yet encountered an art gallery that hasn’t ended in overstimulation. Looking is hard work, people! :)

In the last two weeks I finished The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste. It’s historical fiction set in Ethiopia as Italian armies arrive. It is not an easy read, but beautifully written.

I tried new ways of outlining a short story, without much success:

And I pieced together (literally) a 16 page poem. Here’s one page - do you recognize a line cut out of the journal entry that became today’s essay?

What beautiful or moody things have you been making?