Anik See
Convergence
Handset in Copperplate Gothic and Italian Oldstyle fonts; letterpress printed on a Chandler and Price 8 x 12 on dampened paper (unidentified watercolour paper rescued from a dumpster in a back alley of Vancouver); image printed from an electroplate engraving found in a junk market in Barcelona; text by the artist.
20.5 x 28.5 cm
Text in book:
5:30am. Outside the club, everything a whisper. I walk along Queen for half an hour, until my bus comes. I step onto it, looking out the back window at the sky turning light pink in the east. I'm trying to think when the last time I deliberately stayed up all night was. I cant remember. Five years, at least. The bus is stopped at a red light. The headline on the Sun is GENOA BURNS. A protestor was killed there yesterday. Up the street, there's a man in an abandoned parking lot, selling bonsai trees. At 6 in the morning. He looks very content, sitting on a wooden crate, just gazing at all the things around him. That's the thing with 6am, that's the thing with convergence. You see and hear everything. He sees me sitting on the bus, looking at him, and he looks back at me and smiles. In the 30 seconds that we stare quietly at each other, he suddenly seems to embody all that is concrete in impermanence. In the 30 seconds that passes between us, he makes graspable the impossibility that objects and ideas hold different meaning for every single person who looks at them or embraces them or explores them. It's immeasurable, yet palpable in everything surrounding him, and he, a man selling impossibly small trees from a concrete wedge in Toronto at dawn while Genoa burns, is acknowledging that just now, releasing his sense of self, letting the world work in its own way and just absorbing it. The age-old collision of possibility with reality is what he is.
Anik See is a printer and writer living near Vancouver. In 2002, she started Fox Run Press, whose mandate is to print small, beautifully handcrafted chapbooks and broadsides of politically challenging work.
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