Masculine Charms

"Woodcarver Bert Ohnstad carved canes, bowls, totem poles, and a number of sculptures, but his masterpiece was his Friendship Cane, to which he devoted more than fifty years in the making.  The cedar limb used to make the cane was cut in 1928, as Ohnstad led a Boy Scout troop on a hike in Oklahoma.  A fellow scout leader gave Ohnstad a memento to attach to it, a tiny gold heart with an inscription of the Lord's Prayer.  From then on, people gave him tiny charms and keepsakes to attach to what he had begun to call his Friendship Cane.  Ohnstad carved little niches into the cane and embedded such wonders as a tiny 64-square checkerboard, a shark's tooth, and a petite compass taken from a deceased German soldier's wrist during World War I.  Close inspection reveals six miniature peek-holes embedded into the body of the cane, which reveal glimpses of Niagara Falls ,the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House, a Greek nymph, the Washington Monument, and the Lord's Prayer.  Other attachments include a diamond-studded Rotary pin, a gold coin, a locket, a tiny "arrow head," a Scottie dog charm, a charm commemorating the Piccard statosphere flight, an eagle mascot pin from the 15th Wisconsin Regiment of the Civil War, and a Norse Immigration Centennial Medallion.  Ohnstad counted more than one hundred objects and images carved into, attached to, or embedded into the cane, which exists as a travel diary, masculine version of a charm bracelet, and a remarkable piece of art and Americana."

--Leslie Umberger, Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art

Leslie Umberger's account of Bert Ohnstad's Friendship Cane, a part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gives us a glimpse of an art form that clearly draws upon the much older tradition of the reliquary as well as the Victorian interest in keepsakes, secular relics, and tokens of friendship and memory.  Ohnstad's cane, produced between 1928 and 1979, is the material record of those with whom his life intersected through friendship. His efforts to embed keepsakes within the cane and to create nostalgic "peep holes" suggests privacy, insight, and interiority--a glimpse of the artist and of the era.  Yet in transforming the typically utilitarian cane into a numinous object, Ohnstad's artwork also prompts us to reflect more deeply  about our own private history.

Sweet and Sour

 Stick Candy

Traubel records, "Mrs Davis handed him a bag of mint-candy and he at once gave me a stick.  'You favor it?' he asked, and then dilated like a child on his own fancy for it."

Lemonade

While planning the menu for his seventieth birthday banquet, Whitman remarked: 'It's a damnable drink, I wouldn't have it.'

--qtd. in Gary Schmidgall,editor,  Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892 (2001)

So there you have it.  Walt Whitman loved mints and hated lemonade.  He also loved cheap books, sweet corn, and molasses candy and disliked tobacco, fireworks, comedians, and church.  Little details of this sort--theorist Roland Barthes would call them biographemes--seem terribly important, but not simply because they offer intimate glimpses into one particular famous person's private life.  Rather,  they emphasize private history (as opposed to public or grand history) more generally.  I suspect that private history--and what one loved most or humorously hated most--is most relevant and precious to us at the end of our lives. Our preferences mark our points of intersection with the world--in a sense they are more important than political events, cultural movements, economic changes, scientific discoveries.  Horace Traubel, who visited and assisted Whitman during the last four years of his life evidently recognized their importance as well. 

Iridescent

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler.  The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine.  That does occur in nature, but it is rare.  When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river.  It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair.  It did look like a birth or a resurrection.  For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection.  I've always loved to baptize people,  though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

---Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Sunlit raindrops (and hummingbirds and opal rings) embody the fancy and wonder we attribute to childhood. Baptism, of course, is a renewal of the human spirit--the process of beginning again.  I love the gentleness of this passage.  But most of all, I appreciate its seriousness in praising the sprinkler for its production of rainbows rather than for its hydration of plants.