9/26/97 ... Arthur turns his collar.

The phone message asked me to call Trudy about a commission gift, and we played phone tag for a couple of days. Eventually we made contact. Trudy’s husband, Arthur, was about to have his first book published, and she wanted to give him a congratulatory sculpture. They had seen a publication present I’d done last year, a toy portrait of Mameve Medwed pulling her new book, MAIL, out of a mailbox, and waving it in the air. Trudy wondered if I could do a portrait of Arthur.

“Tell me about the book.”

“It’s called MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, and it’s a first person account of becoming a geisha in prewar Japan.”

We discuss Arthur, appropriate images and iconography. I explain that I need as many pictures as I can get of Arthur, all angles, and source material for Japanese details. There isn’t a totemic animal we can turn him into. Trudy has no preconceived picture of the finished piece, but likes the idea of a freestanding statuette.

“So we should dress him up as a geisha?”

A long pause. “I’m not sure. Let me think about that.”

I want to read the book, so Trudy says she’ll have Mameve send me her review copy, I’ll read it, and we’ll talk. We agree on a price, my standard nick for a single portrait.

The book is wonderful. A captivating yarn, and an ethnographic goldmine to boot. The rich texture of detail is woven into a fascinating life story. Both Peggy and I are smitten. This is one of those rare books that might end up on either side of the bed.

And that may be the key to it’s allure. Somehow Arthur, by crossing the gender divide with his creative imagination, has written an androgynous novel. The exotic setting blurs the gender ambiguity. What a feat. I definitely see Arthur dressed as a geisha. Trudy feels she has to ask him if that’s OK. How very Japanese.

Trudy calls back later. “Arthur says that would be great. I’ll send you the photos and a book of geisha pictures.”

Meanwhile I’m nosing around in the college library on my own. I try geisha and kimono web searches, and am almost swallowed by the erotic cyberworld. Geisha, it turns out is one of THOSE keywords. There is the dialog of an American student who is studying with geishas, and I get to spend a rainy afternoon sitting on my knees, but log off before the evening entertainment. Next day I get my first pornographic junk e-mails. Mary Ito’s vibrator is humming for me. So much for the web.

Bowdoin College does a bit better. I come home with a book on the history of kimono and a collection of Hokusai prints. As I suspected, kimono, like any traditional costume, is a highly inflected language with a convoluted history. The pentimenti of all that cultural evolution encrusts the contemporary outfit. I’m trying to figure out how this piece is supposed to wear kimono, but the deeper in I get, the less I know. I’d like to get it near right, to honor Arthur’s mastery.

Liza Dalby’s history is a boon, but when the picture book arrives from Trudy, I’m confused. It’s a contemporary text (in Japanese), profusely illustrated with shots of maiko and gaiko, apprentice and journeymen geisha. Somewhere between Dalby’s experience as a geisha and the present there has been a radical transformation of kimono. An explosion of luxurious layering and colorist couture. Dalby’s book at least had prepared me for such shifts of fashion, history has repeated itself. I have to call Trudy to firm up details.

“You’d better talk to Arthur.” This is a first for me, asking the subject of a surprise portrait how he should look. I let go of the surprise idea. Arthur tells me which pictures are of the young geisha, before she “turns her collar”.. graduates to mature status. I’m ready to start making sawdust.

I want to use the most highly figured and richly colored woods for the kimono, obi (sash), and other apparatus, but my stock is way down. Ever since we became a one vehicle household, my woodruns and casual scavenging have almost ceased. Those who’ve been in my shop and woodshed might think there’s a lifetime supply of material piled there, but to my eye the inventory is shockingly thin. I bet there’s no more than six ton of wood on the place.

I’d fantasized actually conjuring the traditional colors for a Spring/Summer transition, and somehow applying the appropriate images to the “fabric”, but quickly realized my palette was much too narrow. I’d do better to harmonize in the spectrum I have, and let the luscious wood speak for itself. I do find a block of burly redwood, and a chunk of Brazilian lilac in the exotic reds bin out in my building. I gnaw off a hunk of redwood with my chainsaw, and the airy abstractions turns to pungent chips and lumpen lignum. I drag the materials into Bryce’s cave.

Then I have to face the face. Getting a likeness is the most fearful part of the process. I try to quell my shaking anxiety by puttering. Emptying dust bags, fixing tools, picking up the shop. At this point any distraction will do. The dogs know this and will bark at me, demand long walks. Something in the house will require my complete attention. It may take days before I get up my courage. This time I’ve tricked myself by committing to an early delivery date. I have to face it.

Arthur has a great face. Bold and masculine in its construction, feminine and sensitive in its details. I have the collage of Trudy’s photos mounted on an easel, and have been steeping myself in the lines of his face for days. The uptilt of the nose, the angle of eye, the succession of smile wrinkles. You inevitably sink into a face when you give it intense attention. And into the people as well. I compose my study collage so only the subject’s face shows. I hide everyone else in the pictures. And let the refractions work on me. We do show our character on our faces, and I hope to catch the telling details in my rendition. In the process of devouring a countenance you come to an intuitive understanding of personality. Maybe that’s why I end up feeling my subjects are friends. Friends are those we reveal ourselves to. I get to study the family album, and they get to see me revealed in the work. Which makes me very nervous.

Size is where it starts. There’s always a critical dimension in the piece. The least bit of a mechanism can only be so small, or the biggest chunk of redwood is only 6 inches across. Unless I want to piece up the kimono, that allows me only half a foot from ankle to obi, a distance of three head heights, so we’re talking about a 2 inch head. About average for a portrait. A foot from top to bottom. I set my scaling dividers to two inches, and begin transferring facial dimensions from photos to the block of maple I’ve squared off. My hands tremble.

O the sublime anxiety. It’s first date every time. I’m tenderly guiding the rock maple up against the bandsaw blade, lopping off the excess, and trying to reveal the structural essence of a face. Like dancing with a bull dozer. I remind myself to order new blades, this one is dull and I’m not sure I have an unused backup.

Then it’s up against the disc sander to round the bold outlines, and I’m ready to apply the rotary bits alongside the nose, the lips, the eyes. I now have two well-worn Dremel tools on my bench. They’ve been stripped and rebuilt, had external switches added to replace burned ones, doctored until they work. I’ve added to my collection of bits until I’ve got a toolkit for all the variety of woods, and tasks. I start a face with fairly crude bits, and fine up in stages. The smallest bit separates second eyelids, twitches a grin. But slowly. Very slowly.

When I proportioned and squared up the head block I saw that the grain ran at an angle to the flat sides. When I carve something with bilateral symmetry, like a face, I generally turn the image in the block so it is normal to the grain.. so the lines flow symmetrically right and left. Often it’s these subtle rotations to suit the wood which bring a figure to life. But this time I’m impelled to rotate the face contrary to the grain. I don’t know why. I just follow my intuitions. The effect here is to accentuate a sense of turning, and as his eyes define I realize that Arthur is glancing off to one side, from the corner of his eyes. People do this in the carving. Like characters in a novel, they come to have a life of their own.

If I can get a rough likeness of a face in a day, I feel that’s enough. I’m totally exhausted from holding my breath as the image is born. I have to go run around in the puckerbrush to get my blood circulating. If I push on, trying to get the fine details, I invariably blow it.

In Arthur’s case, the task is compounded by the elaborate geisha hairdo. Because I carve face and hair from different woods, I have to resolve their joinery before I can shape them, and facial proportions don’t look right without the hair in context. I can cut the joint OK, but have a lot of trouble with Arthur’s hair. You fall into patterns of perception.. think you know what you’re seeing. It takes me a long time to stop making assumptions about this hairdo, and simply LOOK at the examples. I’ve done so many faces now that I have a vocabulary of planes and facets. I know basic structures, and can analyze the specific variation. But I’ve never done hair like this. Good, my eyes are reopened to hair. And the puzzle is shuffled by the wood I choose. It’s an exotic “ironwood”, which is the wood dealer’s way of saying “another tough bastard.” I’ve chosen it because it’s color is somewhere between the raven black of the Japanese images and the dark auburn I see in Arthur’s photos. Dark red, heavy, oily, and rank smelling wood. It clogs the wheel on my sanding disc immediately, and shaping it requires about 20 discs, cut and mounted in succession, fans blowing, fug getting deeper. Going to have to wash MY hair tonight. But I know it will shine like a geisha’s bouffant, once oiled. I finally get it roughed out. Phew..come on dogs.

Sometimes, once the likeness has been captured, the rest of the piece flows smoothly, my anxiety ebbs, I’m in the groove. I start dancing to the music in my headphones, or shout back at the talking mouths on the radio. This time I’ve jacked in a book-on-tape: THE PRIZE, an history of the oil business from Colonel Drake in Pennsylvania to the Gulf War. My brother Ian is an oil trader, and I thought this opus (all 34 tapes), might give me some perspective on his world. As usual, the counterpoint between media is good fun. The Japanese are part of the oil story, too, and the whole role of geisha dovetails nicely with the robber barons and oil tycoons. I’m moving in very exalted company this trip. More tea, Rockefeller san?

I notice a distinct perceptual conflict as I carve and listen. The cast of characters in The Prize mushrooms with each chapter, and it would require your whole attention to follow the details. I find that every time I look at pictures, either the photos of Arthur or the geishas in the books, I stop hearing the text, lose track. As I carve, I return to the flow of the book. I’m not concerned about taking notes anyhow, but the fact that two dimensional visual perception interferes with listening, while 3D perception doesn’t is interesting. The conflicting modes are both “books”, but one is read aloud while the other is in Japanese! Marshal MacLuhan where are you?

And it isn’t going easily. Trying to get Arthur into a kimono is awkward. As a static form the look of kimono is stiff, formal, bundled up. The sensuous aspects are the nape of the neck and the riot of fabrics. The female line is wrapped up in yardgoods. In Hokusai’s prints, the figures are lyrical in their animation, their kimonos draped in informing curves. But the contemporary pictures of geiko and maiko make them look like hobbled dolls. My geisha looks like a block of wood.

It takes me days of nibbling at the redwood, a touch here, a wave there, before Arthur begins to move in his costume. I encounter the usual sap pockets in the redwood, and gouging them out gives unexpected animation to the shape. I have no previsualized idea about the pose, and I let the wood yield up the figure’s position. All very subtle, this cloaked gesturing in kimono. A matter of angles of lean and the flick of an eye.

Trudy and I had discussed props. We’d decided that a book and a mirror were apt accouterments for this tale. But was Arthur presenting a book to a client, writing in one, holding a mirror? Only as his pose came to life could I see that he was looking sidelong into a mirror. And what would I use for the mirrorglass? I rummaged in the attic until I found a toy microscope Seth once had, and extracted the glass from it’s mirror. Fitted it into an ebonex frame. Raised his arm until he could see himself. So he wasn’t presenting the book. Perhaps he had his memoir tucked under the other arm, or had his placed marked with his fingers. Both, I decided.

I was torn, and nervous, about the costume details. Novice geisha wear their obis tied in a great trailing bow behind, called a peach blossom, I think. Maybe this is to accentuate the twitching of their tails, or to highlight the gawkiness of a filly’s adolescence. In any case I was uncomfortable with all that loose drapery. Arthur didn’t seem all that innocent to me.

When I first began the kimono I’d carefully chosen a piece of lacewood for the inner kimono which shows at the neckline. I was admiring the fancy brocaded ones in the pictures, and trying to catch their intricacy. Later I realized, with a shock, that the novices traditionally wear a red collar. They mark their graduation by turning turning it to white. I’d been looking at the wrong pictures. I have to make up my mind. Then the penny drops. This publication is ARTHUR’S graduation. Time to tie up his obi in taiko and turn his collar. The last details are coming into focus.

One climax of Memoirs of a Geisha is when the young geisha has her virginity auctioned off to the highest bidder. That culminates the recurring drama of fond hopes and dashed realities. Coming of age, and learning how to move within formal restraints. I’m finding how this carving echoes the narrative. And I’m still looking for MY hook. What is it about this piece that is synchronistic for me, now?

Some years ago I discovered that each piece I make mirrors a part of my inner life. At the level of symbolic meaning, the images I create tell me about myself, and work to transform me. The fact that I’m dressing a man in a kimono right now is a message in disguise, if I can decipher it. In my symbology the masculine is Ego, while the soul is a woman. Anima. Here is Ego, in the shape of a recognizable personality, putting on the garments of Anima. He looks sideways at himself in the mirror. Perseus, you remember, had to look at Medusa (all the monstrous in himself) in a mirror (actually a brazen shield, given by Athena.. rationality), before he could slay her. Maybe you can’t look directly at yourself when your soul is on your sleeve. But you can take notes.

I can no longer simply fulfill a commission as writ. Create a likeness, convey a message, bring a smile. It has to be soulwork, too. If the work is to have any power, for me at least, I have to go down to those places where the symbols are charged. See the work symbolically. Find its meaning in my inner life. Then the charge MAY pass through me into the work. I have no control over that, but at least I’ve grabbed the wire. Maybe the most important labor in the shop is meditating on the images until I find the silent place where they mean something other. A kind of sideways looking in the mirror, when dressed in soul.

Of course there has to be a silly bit, too. There’s still a toymaker in the dust factory. I notice the elaborate pins and insertions in the geisha hairdos. In the old prints these often look like knitting needles, or pencils. But of course. So Arthur has a pencil through his topknot, elegant.. but silly.

And the crowning touch? The pictures show most topknots surmounted by a pin, and I cap Arthur with a purpleheart clasp, which has the Borsoi logo burned into it. Touched on the head by Knopf. Is that it? No. I still have agonies with the split-toed socks and sandals. The angle of tilt. Well I’m not too firmly planted, myself.

But Arthur is done. The vibrant colors leap up under the oil and wax. I shoot a dozen slides to record this passage, and rush out to Bob and Rhoda’s to pack and ship, express. They promise delivery tomorrow.. the day I told Trudy.

There. I stand at Cooks Corner. Like a balloon some kid has puffed to the max, and then let’s go. I rush all over the landscape making foolish noises, bouncing off the walls, until I fall down in the home dooryard. Again.