The Faraway Nearby (21 page)

The poet Antonio Machado writes of dreaming that he had a beehive inside his heart and of the bees making “from my old failures white honeycomb and sweet honey.” Failures are easy to come by, and making honey of them is harder, but I've tried with mine. And sometimes I was given honey directly. Gratitude for friendships and kindnesses runs through this book that is among other things a portrait of what made my life rich even when times were rough, but some of them bear repeating: deepest thanks to Fríða for the key to the far north and her friendship and luminous intelligence, and to Elín for the way she entered my work and I hers, to Úlfur Chaka Karlsson, never met but instrumental. Thanks to the Artangel Foundation that funded and manages Roni Horn's Library of Water and funded my stay there; to Roni Horn for a looking-glass house that looks at the north; and to the magnificent Klara Stephensen for many things while I was there. To these dear friends: Nellie King Solomon and Ann Chamberlain; to Susan Schwartzenberg, Mike Light, and John Lum, who visited me in Iceland; to Sam Green, Marina Sitrin, Pam Farmer, Mike Davis, Rebecca Snedeker, Astra Taylor, Antonia Juhasz, Kaitlin Backlund, Greg Powell and MaLin Wilson-Powell, Thomas Evans, Rupa Marya, Genine Lentine, Marisa Handler, and many others, and apologies to all who should've been named and are not. To all the other artists, including Ana Teresa Fernandez, Subhankar Banerjee, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Caron, and Yoko Ono, whose work thinks through the material and helps me see. To the storytellers, the fabulists and fairy-tale authors, makers of the water in which we all swim, to Aaron Shurin and Tony Cohan for the weeks in Guanajuato in which one of these chapters was written amid walks and conversations and colors; to Vijiya Nagarajan, whose Tamil mother drew kolams on my bedroom floor one evening during the most difficult days, blessings and protections in flour and water that were eventually gnawed away by mice; Malcolm Margolin, the greatest raconteur; as always, to the best agent imaginable, Bonnie Nadell, and the ideal editor, Paul Slovak, and to Sara and Michal and Max at Granta; to the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin for commissioning me to write an essay for the exhibition catalog of True North, some small portions of which are recycled here; and to the National Endowment for the Arts whose grant to me helped open up the time to write this book. To Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez for telling me about meeting Che Guevara; to my nephew Zur for a little help with the Hebrew word
hevel;
to Zenkei Blanche Hartman for stitching me into her lineage; to Shokan Jordan Thorn for some theological consultation; to Lance Newman for that invitation to go down the Colorado; to the Zen Girl Gang; to David Graeber for his insights on debt and value; to the woman at Urban Fauna in the Sunset District who demonstrated spinning wool by hand for me; to the Rumsen Ohlone for an invitation to a summer Bear Dance; to my brother David for the load of apricots and much more. And special gratitude to El Tanguero, who mysteriously lost the Kurosawa movie disk halfway through our viewing so that we moved on to watch Pasolini's
Arabian Nights,
which made me tell him what I knew of the form of
The Thousand and One Nights
and then and there conceive the form of this book, soon after launched with his encouragement.

I finished writing this book several months before the death of my mother, Theresa Allen (1928–2012). After she was gone, I felt more strongly the presence of the dark-haired, yearning, thwarted young woman before I existed and the mother I must have clung to as a tiny child. The middle-aged woman who had so confounded me for decades became just one figure among many, and I missed the ancient, gentle, far-gone person who brought up the rear of the parade.