It Matters Where You Are.

Of caviar limes, a failed resort, and materials as beings.

“Everything we come across is the point” — John Cage

Last week I was at the airport on my way to a desert adventure and the last email I opened before I put on my vacation reminder and totally ignored my phone for a week was from Brian D. Johnson director of The Colour of Ink, a documentary in its final stages of production with the NFB. I quote his message to me here in full:

Hi Jason,

This question can wait till you’re home. Or you may want to contemplate it while sitting in a departure lounge.

The casual viewer may wonder: what’s so special about desert salt?  Or water foraged from a Oaxaca fountain or a Brooklyn beach or a Tokyo waterfront?

Is the provenance purely symbolic? Is it simply that these locally foraged ingredients help form the story behind the ink?  Or are there discernible differences in the ink that is made from them?

B.

I wanted to write Brian right back and say of course there is a difference! Think of the PH of water. Consider the UV beta carotene pigments protecting the bacteria still swimming in the pockets of water in the crystals of deep ancient lake salt described to us by Aaron Celestian and his friend Scott Perl from the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Everything I do is place-based, and my whole project is to discover how colour and landscape influence each other, and the particularities of ingredients are what gives natural ink its subtleties and my collection of vials of water is dear to me. But then I thought maybe I would just let the question percolate while I was travelling. And the more I thought about it the more interesting the question became, and now that I am back in slushy grey Toronto I thought I would try to answer it here with three objects found on my trip.

ITEM 1 : 1/2 of a dried finger lime

I found this in my pocket inadvertently smuggled across the border when I got home and it still had just the hint of the smell that set off the memory of squeezing it to harvest the little beads of lime caviar that explode with that bright energizing high note that only finger limes have. I had never tried one before and this one came straight off the tree in Wattles Community Garden in the Hollywood Hills. My cousin Roma Lake introduced me to the caviar lime along with the tiny plot that she has been tending and getting to know and writing a gardening memoir about. The thing is that Roma has spent so many hours in this garden that she has gotten to know the ways and personalities not only of the elderly Russian gardeners, but also of its other living inhabitants. She showed me the old avocado trees with their wild ballet of branches, and capricious fruiting cycles, and the tomato plants and rose vines which have lived such complicated lives and are now sleeping and the almost bonsai’d trunks of poinsettias growing free from their typical Christmas pots. In the golden light of the Los Angeles afternoon, even the bricks and dirt have become in my eyes (and through Roma’s attention) not objects to care for, but subjects to be with and learn from. This notion that plants, water and even a tiny patch of dirt can become animate made me think of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of Ojibwe grammar which she describes grappling with in Braiding Sweetgrass. Gender in the Algonquian languages that Ojibwe belongs to is not divided into male and female (an arbitrary-at-best binary) but into animate and inanimate, and so many things that the English language would call objects are treated as animate: snow and sky and earth, mushrooms and stars and mittens. I know that language is more complicated than this, but I feel the same way about the ingredients of ink: when given their proper attention they are not just elements in a medium of communication but themselves communicating between each other and with us if we stop long and carefully enough to listen.

ITEM 2 : a fishbone harvested from the shoreline of the Salton Sea

I would never have found this bone if it weren’t for advice of my friend Emma who is known as the photographer who took the picture that broke the internet for Getty Images. She is also a resplendent photographer and knows some magical places and suggested a visit to a ghost resort known as the Sultan Sea. The beaches there are strewn with the bones of tilapia introduced for the benefit of sportfishermen in the 1930s that died by the millions in the 1980s when salinization, chemical runoff and evaporation turned an ill-conceived irrigation project, resort for Hollywood elites and fish and bird sanctuary, into one of California’s greatest man-made environmental disasters with toxic winds, burnt out hotels, and an endless beach of dead fish.

Around 1900 a desert basin a few hours east of Los Angeles and directly over the San Andreas Fault became the largest lake in California when optimistic engineers and real estate prospectors diverted the Colorado River with a dream of irrigating the desert. When water levels rose the town of Salton, a Southern Pacific Railroad siding, and Torres-Martinez Native American land were submerged creating a lake where it didn’t belong and we still didn’t get it. The new lake became a playground where Rock Hudson water-skied, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis partied on Guy Lombardo’s yacht, the Beach Boys sunbathed and President Dwight Eisenhower golfed. As the lake dried up in the 1970s and 80s, salt and agricultural chemicals concentrated to the point that beaches became toxic dust in the air and the resorts, the speculators, the fish and birds and anyone with enough money to leave all disappeared. The fishbone remains. I took it home as a ghostly souvenir and like Brian said, materials are sometimes a compressed way to carry a story. But it’s not just the story attached to the object that I am interested in, it’s also the material itself and fishbones hold a special place for the inkmaker. If you boil down a fishbone for long enough you get collagen. And its this collagen glue from fishbones that was the traditional binder of lampblack a Chinese carbon-based ink that competes with Egyptian lampblack for the first of written records. I can’t wait to use this fishbone as the beginning of an ink as a way to reconfigure this tragic relic of the desert into something new. Natural ink has both a backstory and forwardstory.

ITEM 3 : A photograph of the acorn caps of a desert scrub oak in Joshua Tree National Park.

I kept trying to take pictures of landscape in the high desert where I was visiting and everything looked like a postcard or like a tourist photo of someone posing in front of some rocks and cactuses. And Joshua Tree being a national park I could not take even a twig out of the park so all I had to forage with were my senses. I kept trying (along with everyone else in the park) to capture something by taking pictures. It was only when I noticed that what looked like a bushy weed growing out a crack in the rock that had an acorn cap on its branches and got up really close to it to really see the miniaturized oakleaf shapes that I was able to take a picture that I liked. And the difference was that I became in that moment not just a tourist collecting interesting memories but an inkmaker noticing a living phenomenon. I would love to understand the way that oaks can grow in the desert and how they might modify themselves and hybridize around the issue of water shortage and what kind of galls I might find on their branches and what kind of ink I could make from what falls from them, but all this is research for later trips, and for now I feel lucky to conjure up the whole trip with just this picture.

“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour provokes a psychic vibration. Colour hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body... The symphonic arrangement of colour provokes a physical, emotional, and even spiritual response in the viewer.” —Wassily Kandinsky

So how do these three objects I brought back with me across the border answer Brian’s question? I think the answer has to do with paying attention to all of the little details. The story of materials can not be separated from their ecology and chemistry and from the history and meaning that comes from the way humans interact with them. When Tokyo tap water is used to boil up some bark sent to me in the mail from a friend in North Carolina something happens that is different than what happens when those same leaves are boiled in snowmelt from my backyard. If we can’t see the difference it is not because water is just water but because we see it too simply or do not let ourselves be modified as we observe it. Place-based ink continues to surprise me with its hidden qualities— a power “still unknown but real” as Kandinsky puts it. It is in trying to answer the question “what is so special about desert salt?” that the materials become animated, the crystals begin to bond to the pigments they have been added to, and the asker is modified. JL

PS: the title “It Matters Where You Are” is a line taken from Slowdive’s “When the Sun Hits” from their seminal dreampop album Souvlaki. And that beautiful little plate that the fishbone is on is by Akai Ceramics.

PPS: Have ideas about objects as beings? Desert colour? Salinization? Just want to say hello? Join the lively comments section here:

PPPS: Please spread the word. The Colour is still free and I am trying to start a colour revolution: