Things As They Are

"Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar."

-Wallace Stevens

I’ve been troubled by computer problems and an inconstant internet these past few days.  I had to remind myself there was a time when such things were not only unnecessary, but not even available.  I had to think:  what, then, were the things I used to use?

I no longer own a typewriter, so I looked around for a notebook and a pen.  I found them foreign objects, and inefficient.  I looked for a dictionary, but had only a small paperback that didn’t contain what I required.  I wanted confirmation of something I’d been told:  that the etymological root of the word “poet” was “maker.”  Without my usual tools to search, I was thrown back on my own experience for proof.

Our poet-friend is certainly a maker.  Not just of lovely poems, though that is beyond argument, but also other things.  It is essential to her, I think, to make things daily:  clever little pin cushions and coasters made from scraps of cloth, place-setting markers of stiff paper adorned with simple drawings or on which are fastened a single leaf.  She makes books of poems, too:  folded paper bound by a bit of thread.

She is the only person I know who sews.  I tried to think when I’d last had need of a straight pin—or, for that matter, a needle—and couldn’t remember.  Let alone the last time I’d seen a packet containing a pattern from which a smock or jumper might be cut out.  Are such things even sold anymore?

I kept coming back to the photograph of a painting of a tomato I’d found (thus, a tomato twice removed).  How appealing it was!  More appealing, somehow, than a real tomato—but also real itself.  I thought, too, of the drawings and paintings of another maker of lovely things, the background taken from, perhaps, the liner of an envelope, and drawn on it, maybe, a shard of pottery washed up on the beach.  And I thought of the rubber shoe sole made into a boat that couldn’t float.

Wallace Stevens is right, I see:  just as a picture of a tomato is a thing distinct from the tomato, so any poem or work of art is "part of the res itself and not about it."  The equation is, in fact, simple enough:  a made thing is a real thing, too.