Another impossibility. From almost a week ago now. I was liking all the re-coverings--where something definite regains its ambiguity--and then the inclination to put in the white. Maybe I should have been more stealthy--you have to be absolutely ready to let the thing go where it wants--to stay on that edge--but I lost the moment, and began rifling through plans held in reserve.
What Guston meant when he talked about not stepping back from the canvas or it would be all over. Not literally, of course--he'd work on those paintings for hours--the scale demanded it--and you can't stand in the same place forever.
But here time is flexible.
I imagined a white shape with less-defined proportions, but the whole thing came to a halt when I saw the cup. Recalling the shape of those small iron-oxide vessels--brought as a gift from Chinatown, still on the shelf here. Or was it my mother's cabinet on Fowles Street? Merged again with white cups B made in her last months--I collected them at the clay studio at Cal after she was gone. Finding them on one of the bisque-ware shelves, white under-glaze...
The Tu Fu poem about their river outing near the Thatched Cottage. Children playing at the water's edge, Tu Fu and his wife in the skiff...
Here comes some tea and sugarcane juice / brought down from the house
our earthen pots are just as good / as any made from jade...
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Overall, the balance seems too formal. Implying a symmetry, where usually it's better to keep things open. The title helps--but it may be an afterthought... Came to me later. What I started with were the chalky whites...
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Note: David Young translation
