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Boulder
I had a boyfriend who was always looking at his watch. We weren’t together long enough for me to get bored with him. I was a dog you hold out a stick to, and the dog bites the end of the stick. Richard takes long walks with me because I like to take long walks. I forget this as soon as we set out. Another boyfriend told me, “The power position in a relationship resides in the person who is willing to leave.” He was that person in our relationship.
Ten years ago, Richard and I are at Kew Gardens—a remnant of the Victorian ambition to collect samples of everything. In this case, botanical specimens. We walk a course on top of 50-foot trees. A plaque reports that England is home to nine million trees. How do they count them? We see the oldest potted plant in existence, encephalartos altensteinii. A Jurassic cycad—a species that predates flowering plants and existed at the time of dinosaurs. The plant is over 300 years old, and it’s easy to see how it has lived that long. It’s in its own pot.
I start to worry about our plants in Arizona. Then I remember our friend Bill kept them alive the year before. So I worry about my plants in New York, where my friend Adam has already killed a few. I don’t mention these thoughts to Richard. Often he will say to me, “You don’t have to voice every thought that comes into your head. Most people don’t say the majority of stuff they think.” I say, “They don’t?” He says, “No.”
In the café at Kew, I write about David Nash, whose sculptures are installed around the grounds and in the galleries. Nash uses dead trees, hedges, twigs, sod, and seeds in his work, and I become aware I’m more interested in art made of nature than by nature itself, even in the woven carpet of a garden. When I look at nature, I disappear. It’s relaxing. A lot of people like disappearing in nature. I do, too, but maybe not for as long as they do.
At the center of Nash’s show is a series of sculptures carved from a giant tree that died on a mountain in Wales. The tree’s life is over, but wood goes on seeming alive. The growth rings look like the scales of fish and the cells of a beehive. The tree is a body with arms, legs, a trunk, and bones. Its scars and fractures are intact. And in the tree, Nash has found boats, benches, boxes, and a rough pig with twig legs.
The most powerful component is a film Nash shot about a boulder he carved in 1978, when the tree was first discovered. After he finished sculpting the boulder, it proved so heavy he decided to float it down the mountain along a cascading stream. He filmed the process, and he kept filming it, because nothing he planned happened. Early in the boulder’s journey, it became snagged on rocks. After a year or so, it hurtled to another perch where it was trapped again, and after several years of watching the boulder buried in snow and darkened by iron in the rushing stream, after watching it erode and become etched with ridges that took on the features of a forbearing face, after seeing the boulder bob like a seal and float into a salt marsh and sit stranded on a plain of mud, like the last speaker of its language, Nash decided the boulder belonged to the mountain and the sea, and he did not try to move it to his studio. The film documents the boulder’s history up until 2003, when Nash saw it for the last time. Others sighted it in 2008, but it has not been seen since.
Richard and I sit on leather benches watching the film, and as images of the boulder and the stream rush by, I’m swept along on a current of emotion I can’t name. On the wall beside us is a text written by Nash that takes my breath away: “The boulder is not lost. It is wherever it is.”
In the café, the man who serves our tea is of South Asian heritage and speaks with a British accent. Everywhere in England, we float on waves of multi-culturalism, immigration, and legacies of empire. It’s easy to think you’re in a place where everyone is a traveler and therefore everyone can find a perch, although no one is home.
Richard left England half a lifetime ago. He keeps saying, “England doesn’t feel like home.” Both his parents have recently died, and he no longer knows the current slang. He means he’s in mourning. He means he doesn’t see a way back.
He gestures to the man behind the counter and says, “He wants us to leave.” The man doesn’t want us to leave. The place doesn’t close for another 45 minutes. Richard is concerned we’re a bother. I close my notebook. He says, “I wish I weren’t like this.” His eyes slide to the edge of the table. He says, “Thanks for accepting me.” Do I?
Another day, we’d agreed to wander around London and possibly get lost. Richard kept checking his map and suggesting routes for us, as if we did have a destination. Wherever we were, he charted our way back to Bloomsbury, as if never leaving was the goal. After a while, he put the map away. I said, “You can look at the map if you want to.” He said, “This is more fun.” I knew it wasn’t fun for him, but later that day when we got out our notebooks, he wrote, “Location is all about arrival, although arrival might not exist.”
Over coffee one day, he said, “I’m the most patient person you know.” I immediately believed him, and then I wondered if this was an example of brainwashing. I tried to think of other people who liked me more than Richard, and no one came to mind. I tried to think of someone I liked more than him, and I arrived at the same point.
The day of our visit to Kew, after we return to Bloomsbury, we comb the neighborhood for a place to eat. We pass a man in a wheelchair, and Richard says, “There will come a time when we won’t be able to walk as much as we do now.” He laughs and says, “What should I do with you when you die?” I say, “Burn me and toss the ashes into a bin.” He says, “No service? No gathering at the apartment for a glass of sherry and fond remembrances?” I say, “No one will care as much as you.”
That night in the tapas bar we choose, I write about Richard and me at the café. He writes about the boulder, pointing out that Nash changed his original plan. Nash was still producing an art project, but instead of showing the boulder in a gallery, he presented a collaboration with the natural environment. I say, “That’s really interesting.” Richard says, “With this kind of art, you look less at the object and more at what it makes you feel. The boulder asks us to think about how we measure success. It asks us to think about what is given to us and what we can change.”
He sips his wine and dips a bread stick in olive oil. A light comes into his eyes. He says, “The story of the boulder and the story of us in the café are versions of each other. That’s why the movie went into us. Sometimes the boulder is a rock, sometimes it’s wood, sometimes it’s an animal. It gets stuck, and so do we. Both of us are the boulder, and both of us are the water, swirling around it. We are big and weighty to each other, but a relationship changes as it gets rubbed.”
I said, “I could never have come up with that in a million years.” He said, “Yes, you could have.”
I find this very affecting, for reasons I am not yet able to tease out. The complexities of relationships. Loving the uses to which nature can be put, rather than nature itself. Nash. Thank you for this. What a gift your writing is. I will be coming back to this. If my fucking printer were not being stubborn, I would print it out and put it on my desk, or in your last book.
“You don’t have to voice every thought that comes into your head. Most people don’t say the majority of stuff they think.” Ha. I love this. Thank you for voicing every thought 😊🫶🏻