Impossibilities

Let’s pretend you have never, but never (ridiculous, I know, but bear with me) wandered through the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog which I often mention here. Consequently, you don’t know anything about their structured interviews with (mostly) children’s-book illustrators and authors.

Maybe even further, even more basically, you don’t know that the blog’s title alludes to Lewis Carroll. (In which case, go here* and scroll down a bit.)

Imagine now that you’re an author or illustrator who doesn’t know any of that stuff, and you’ve been approached for a 7-Imp online interview. So when you run into the very first sentence of the request, you’re immediately baffled. Mind you, now, I’ve no idea how the first sentence actually reads, but let’s suppose the request opens something like this:

Dear You,

We would like to feature you in an upcoming interview for the Seven Impossible Things blog…

What runs through your head then?

Right. As it apparently ran through the great Ed Young’s head when invited to his recent interview there (#79!). Born in Tientsin, China, grown up in Shanghai, a survivor of the Japanese occupation in WW2, he is drawn to questions of philosophy. So his first response — even before Yes or No — is a simple question, but it comes out weighted with unintended significance:

What are the seven impossible things?

The question has haunted me since I read it yesterday. Detached from the context on 7-Imp, it’s like a challenge to the listener: What are the seven things or experiences which should not exist, but do?

The answer(s) might vary from listener to listener; after all, the very word “should” implies a whole universe of IMOs. So take this with a grain of salt. I’m going to try answering it, for myself if no one else, in a series of seven occasional posts spread out across… well, however long it takes me.

This post itself is about Impossibility #1. Fittingly enough, it too occurred to me as I read about Mr. Young.

A cherished tradition in Western art, especially contemporary art, holds that an artist (or writer, performer, and so on), while capable of marveling at the world in general, must marvel principally at himself. After all (so goes the thinking), if he doesn’t see himself as just the absolute bee’s knees, then why expose his art to the world? He must believe he has something to offer — something special — right? All the more in the last few decades, as the terms art and pop culture have interbred, becoming nearly indistinguishable from each other: twin halves of the creative experience.

Now along comes Ed Young.

A recent book which he illustrated, Wabi Sabi, tells the story of a cat by that name. All the cat knows is that her name represents, well, something; in a mixture of text, haiku, and Young’s illustrations, the book tells the story of the cat’s attempts to learn just what the real wabi sabi might be. As 7-Imp’s review indicates, by the end of the story Wabi Sabi “begins to understand,” at least a little:

She looked carefully at the woods surrounding them. There was so much life, as in the city, but here things were not clean, neat, or sharp-edged. There were no straight lines, yet there were many designs—on trees, in clouds and dirty ponds. She saw that everything was

alive and dying
too, like the damp autumn leaves
curled beneath their feet.

During the preparation of Wabi Sabi, Young lost the original illustrations. Here’s the story as outlined at a different blog:

Young’s first set of illustrations, which took him two years to complete, mysteriously disappeared after he dropped them off on the front porch of his agent’s house.

(While taking his wife to the hospital, Young had dropped the bundled illustrations in an envelope at the agent’s doorstep, but they never showed up at the N.Y.C. office of his editor Alvina Ling. The agent never saw the package. Police and parcel delivery services were called. Locations were scoured to no avail.)

A few months later, when everyone came to grips with the idea that the art truly was lost, he had to start over with only weeks until his deadline. In the meantime, his wife had just died of cancer. “I was in crisis mode,” Young said.

He had already cleaned out and re-organized his studio. The brightly colored paper and tissue scraps and slivers that had been the raw materials for his pictures were gone. He had also tossed all of his visual references — except for some angled, distorted snapshots that Ling had made of the collages in his studio.

He may have been in crisis mode then. But how does he feel about it now, looking back? An excerpt from the 7-Imp interview:

7-Imp: You’ve said before that “producing a book becomes part of the spirit of each person who touched it.” What did you learn about the people who helped bring Wabi Sabi to publication, particularly after the rather arduous journey to publication the book had (the lost art, etc.)

Ed: The spirit of each person who touched it (and those who’d touched them), not to mention whoever took the “lost art,” and my wife, who passed away during that interim — they all challenged me unwittingly to move forward to create what is now the Wabi Sabi book. For that, I am grateful.

In general form, the story may recall for you that of Ernest Hemingway’s suitcase of early manuscripts, left on a train — denied to posterity — in 1922. The story goes that his first wife, Hadley, had very efficiently put pretty much everything he’d ever written to that point, including spare copies, into some luggage he was taking on a trip to Switzerland. A short while later, Hemingway wrote, in a letter to Ezra Pound:

I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left [i.e., after the loss] and found that Hadley had made the job complete by including all carbons, duplicates, etc. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure [an editor] and me, and some journalistic carbons. You, naturally, would say, “Good” etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.

I ain’t yet reached that mood. I’m with you on that, EH — I wouldn’t ever again be in the mood, I think.

Yet here is Ed Young, a couple years after a similar loss, asserting, calmly and with self-effacement, that really, now, the experience made everything so much better. He’s glad it happened.

I don’t know what you call this sense of retrospectively insightful calm. It seems  to me a very fine, rarefied sort of humility.

Whatever you call it, I’m amazed to find it exists.

______________________________

* If you’re feeling especially geeky, check out that URL: page_id=2. Got that? This was the second page they ever built for their blog. Wow. Are these people literate or what? (And for a real treat, if you’re a real 7-Imp groupie, go up into the address bar and change that =2 to =1 to see the blog’s very first. page. evah.)