Kyo Maclear on writing the Ambient Green
Meech Lake, 立夏
I took the early morning train to the capital to meet the Japanese ambassador and the former environment minister the sky only half awake and soft, and heavy like yogurt stirred with ashy blue over the lake I’m listening to the music we found out together. It’s the day of the eclipse and I am finally alone with my thoughts. And what are those thoughts? Chaos.
I may have gone a bit too far with my project of embracing the darkness of not knowing last week. I may have ended up on the dark side of the moon. But today feels different. The sun broke through and the grounded, forward motion and expectationless calm of riding a train through wholesome Canadian farmland is a pretty great antidote to overthinking. And anyway how long can a person live in a state of confusion? (Don’t answer that)
Even deep in my state of confusion I had a bit of guide. The book came just at the right time. I think its a book that will resonate with ink-makers and natural colour people in its appreciation of both careful exploration and its embrace of transitory beauty. Its called Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets and its written by Kyo Maclear who is a friend and sometimes collaborator. I went to see her in conversation with Sarah Fulford on the second floor of the Moriyama spaceship that is The Toronto Reference Library. I took some notes: She talked about touching the ground, wild green language, a mentor named Jack Breakfast and Michael Ondaatje’s notion of the “half-open door inside of us”. She also talked about the 72 micro seasons of Japan including one called “when the insects awaken” and something that I underlined called “The Ambient World”. I had to buy the book, take it home and start reading it right away.
This is a thrilling family memoir mystery that really lets the reader in on the unspooling and respooling of Kyo’s family story and a series of revelations that redefine her sense of her own family and past. But really thats just the headlines, or the outlines of what she is up. There is something else going on that I want to talk about. Something planty, alchemical and atmospheric that has stayed with me and continues to alter me in ways that I want to share with you.
So I talked to Kyo on the phone last weekend. I asked her about this idea of ambient world and she talked a lot about trying to find new ways to be ally to whole living world around us. She talked about stories of women, stories of plants, stories of the underground microbiome and stories of the the whole breathing ecology that we humans form an unbound-able part of. She talked about the Japanese concept of “ma” of making a space for meaning between definitions. She talked about ‘kinetic questions’ that honour the unknown. She talked about recognizing that all books are a truce with time.
We talked about how writing in a newsletter does not have to be fixed like a book but can be a laboratory. We talked about intersubjectivity as an alternative to the singular sovereign hero. About her time working for Bruce Mau and his forays into rethinking what a book is and can be. I took notes. Phrases like “the coastline of what I understood to be me” sometimes rolled off her tongue making me wish I was recording rather than just taking notes.
We talked a bit about my struggles with health and about how so much of illness is less a problem your body has and more a problem not fitting into capitalism’s schedule and how with Woolf we both liked the idea of quitting the upright army and going horizontal. I felt excited at the end of our conversation. I felt hopeful about the possibilities of dissolving the old vertical hierarchies with a politics of the porous.
But this is already sounding like too much of a book review. Mostly I just wanted to tell you how much this is a book that made me feel alive. I don’t want to explain its plot or structure or what I discovered by reading it. Rather I want to induce you to breath in its air. But how? Inspired by the book’s own rethinking of story I thought I would offer you a constellation of foraged quotes that I loved from the book. Each its own micro season. I hope you will read them and from them maybe find your own way into the inspired, shared uncertainty of the ambient green.
“If we opened people up we’d find landscapes” Agnes Varta The Beaches of Agnes
“The unseen greens, the hazy ‘scenery’ of life”
“This is a plant book made of soil, seed, leaf and mulch.”
“our fizzy edges”
“The air and atmosphere. Its full of content. The background is full of truth.”
“Monet once said ‘For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value’”
“Family is sometimes just an approximation, a shape in your heart.”
“I began to wonder if there was a positive form of self-forgetfulness that came with forgetting one’s own habits of mind.”
“We speak the dinginess of ground covered in mush, the reek of nourishing rot. We speak air, full of compost, smell wet iron and blood. We touch the un-languageable.”
“Touch is its own sorcery.”
“family can be a much larger and swirling aggregate…”
“We need to talk about the weather, people “ [quoting friend J.]
“There is a growing space between our words. I call it the yard.”
“fog! Fog is the level before knowledge.”
“the wisdom of fragile groupings”
I meant to send you this note last night. I went for a walk in the full moon around Meech Lake with a dear friend and then fell into a deep peaceful sleep. The lake was a perfect silvery mirror of trees and stars. I work up this morning to a note from Kyo. Today is 立夏 Rikka (Beginning of summer) she said and the beginning of a new tiny season too:
May 5–9 蛙始鳴 Kawazu hajimete naku Frogs start singing
What season are you in now, I wonder? What is its colour?
Jason,
I love where you take my newsletters. Colour energy sounds like it could be a book.
Gorgeous piece, Jason, and thank you for turning me on to another book I want to read❤️