My Enduring Knife

Gouache and watercolor on archival chipboard; JD.

Forty years ago this knife was gifted to me by mentor-friends on the eve of my departure from the California Bay Area where I had lived off-and-on for sixteen years. I had finished my doctoral work at UC Berkeley and accepted a job offer in Texas. We all knew the superstitions surrounding knives, so it is likely a loaf of bread accompanied the gift. I can’t remember. But the strong cleaver shape of the knife and its heft in hand felt potent. This was a knife to rely on, as, indeed, I had relied on these former teachers who had morphed into collaborators and friends.

Among my poor possessions, the knife stood out, not only because it was new and expensive, but in part because it was meant for a cook with more than my level of skill. I would not even have known where to buy such a knife. My mentors, who had taught me so much in formal and informal settings, showed me that not only was there still much for me to learn, but that there were realms of knowledge I didn’t even know existed. The knife was a vivid reminder of ignorance, like a portal to the next level of a game you thought you had mastered.

            I packed it into my newly acquired used car for the drive to Dallas, launching its trajectory through multiple scenes and locations across several decades travelling in my household belongings. Throughout, the blade remained sharp, never subjected to any wheel or whetstone, its forged edge enduring through some secret of manufacture.

Now the knife has become a symbol of the cut between the period of academic apprenticeship and professionalism. But also, it marks the dividing line between staying in the security of familiar friend networks and plunging into an unknown realm. Leaving the Bay Area was almost unthinkable to most of my cohort, as was leaving their city to my Manhattan-based friends. They made sacrifices to remain, but I did not have the luxury to pass up an academic job offer. I felt the pull of adventure into the strange world of Dallas, a naïve “anything could happen” attitude. Half of my belongings had to be shipped by Amtrak freight, the cheapest transport for books, papers, and the meagre supply of household goods in my possession. The rest went into the back of the Nissan station wagon according to a plan sketched out in advance on a carefully measured paper template.

The knife went into the car, a late addition to the meticulously planned departure. My mentor friends wished me well with the kindness of older siblings as I launched into the new phase of my life. Other friends shook their heads in mild disbelief—Texas??? In 1986, Dallas, as I have written elsewhere, had fallen on hard times. The aspirations to the postmodern architectural transformation of downtown had halted mid-stream and many half-built buildings sat empty, plastic sheeting flapping in the unfinished openings of what were to have been sheet walls of windows. I didn’t think of the knife as a magical sword imbued with special powers of protection, but  it began to demonstrate its reliable edge from the outset, cutting through vegetables with the same swift immediacy as it did the meat I was still eating in those days. My Hong-Kong-raised roommate, she of the Chinese bracelet and privileged circumstances, had passed on wisdom from her family’s Asian cook, including the instruction to use a knife to separate a chicken at the joints, not through the bones, a task the knife performed adeptly without any dulling effect.

In the series of subsequent moves, to Somerville, MA, then Manhattan, New Haven, and Charlottesville, the knife simply became part of the always-there equipment of my kitchen drawer. The friends who had given it to me went through their own changes, remaining in my life but differently configured. I became aware that in human constellations, as in stellar ones, the individual rate of movement is not apparent at the outset. The couple dissolved and I had to recalibrate the way my own navigation of experience had been guided by those coordinates in my personal sphere. The knife acquired signs of use and wear, but its edge remained unaffected by use. Everything changes at its own rate. The illusion of a unified temporal frame disappeared as trajectories in my life progressed at varied speeds of faster or slower transformation. The casts characters came and went with alarming speed. Whole dramas played out in a few weeks’ time or in a compressed summer season while the knife aged according to its own timescale, slowly slowly if at all.

In Dallas I taught at a campus that had been a research outpost with emphasis on technology and only upper-division undergraduates. A dean had been brought in to create an experimental program combining history, theory, and practice in an interdisciplinary program of arts and performance. I was hired at the same time as a performance artist who walked in a waddle and quacked like a duck during her job interview and a man whose shadow puppet play of a scene from The Tempest would have been banned in most states in the nation for its implications of pederasty. In my interview, I showed slides of dinosaur imagery and recited a litany of theoretical principles including semiotics, psychoanalysis, and cultural theories of visual epistemology. Then, hired, we all did our best, more or less, to build an experimental curriculum under the banner of the “avant-garde.” The campus was in the town of Richardson, in a dry county, north of Dallas, where the land seemed to have been left over after the building of a KMart on an adjacent lot. In the suburban sprawl of new homes, the visiting artists who arrived were baffled by the local culture and the highly detailed rules for campus parking in the midst of the bleakly open surrounding space. But they came, the European super-sophisticated black-garbed theater folks, the frighteningly thin New York City heroin addict artist touted as a gifted sculptor, the California nearly new-age guru self-styled shaman. All visited a place where the main concern was to avoid sitting in the grass since it was rife with “chiggers” who buried deep in your flesh if given the opportunity. Our students were mainly bright sensible women returning to school to finish an undergraduate degree, though the eager Dean did manage to recruit a handful of doctoral students for whom the opportunity to create practice-based PhD was a still-rare and highly attractive novelty. At a commuter campus with a motley crew of faculty, we struggled to create any sense of community.

I taught myself art history, marching systematically through the books on our meagre library shelves and creating syllabi that would later provide credibility: Dada and Surrealism, Art since 1945, Modern Art and Theory. The art building was of course “temporary,” as they generally are, made of corrugated steel and set slightly apart from the rest of the campus. In my second year I painted an installation work in one small area of its gallery. Titled “Screen Memory” it was a black and white fully immersive stage-set activated by a lightbulb that turned the scene of a benign family dinner table into a nightmare of psychic trauma depicted by long shadows and threatening gloom, a demonstration of the Freudian concept of creating memory to conceal trauma. A colleague, meanwhile, who laid claim to being a “real” artist, tied himself into a bundle and whimpered for days in a kind of solipsistic masturbatory exercise of protest against patriarchy, his own gender, and a host of other no doubt suffocating oppressions, video-taping himself the whole time.

I left Dallas after two years, taking with me a barely augmented inventory of possessions, accompanied by a red Texas tabby, Punky. I drove the same Nissan station wagon, having once again visited the Amtrak freight office to ship bulky items to Massachusetts, the next stop on my career pilgrimage. The knife came along, of course, a passive passenger still sharp as the day I had received it, or so I believed. If it has dulled since then, I hardly notice, so used to its role in my life, its reliability. Now I see the edge, not merely as the feature of the utensil, but as the instrument that participated in cutting one phase of life from another. At the moment of the cut one has no idea what will continue and what is left behind, or even that the act of demarcation is a trauma. You go on. The knife remains, still sharp, a steady companion, its nicks and faults as familiar as that of any friend of long acquaintance, unaware of the role it played in defining the “before” and “after” at a certain moment of my life.