Solid Objects: Cameron Quan Louie
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Cameron Quan Louie. You can read his piece, “Box Within Which,” from our Tiny Architectures issue here.
Diagrams of An Antique Lock
My wife listens patiently while I try to describe the self-storage on Speedway, where you can get a luxurious five-by-ten unit for about $80/month, or for half that price, you can tetris your heirlooms into an adequate five-by-five.
She nods politely while I explain that self-storage is all about managing claustrophobia, adopting an attitude of “as much as possible” while maintaining the assumption of “as little as possible.” In poetry, this is sometimes referred to as economy. The unwritten rules of self-storage are that 1) No one looks into anyone else’s unit if the door is open, and 2) Everyone imagines what’s inside the other units but would rather not look into their own.
I tell her this anecdote from before we met: during one of my annual retrievals or deposits, I uncovered (beneath a dollhouse, a wicker chest, and a file box full of medical receipts) an antique steam trunk that had belonged to Quan. I do not know much about Quan except that he came from China, adopted my father, made a humble living in California without ever learning much English, saved some money, lost the money, and then died dramatically in his living room. His wife, Ngit Seem Der, was famous for saving her urine in jars to feed the garden. The surname “Der” may mean “to thank,” “to apologize,” or “to wither.”
Inside Quan’s trunk was a U.S. army uniform made of coarse fabric and some other military paraphernalia. The trunk itself was held shut by an unusual brass lock. Now the lock, which looks a bit like a miniature toolbox attached to the letter “D” sits on my desk, and who knows what happened to the trunk or the uniform. Here is one diagram of the lock:
Trying to describe the lock is a preposterous task, but writers—especially poets, for whom the image is a minor form of spirituality—are supposed to be able to describe things. Even so, I have never especially enjoyed describing anything, like the steam trunk I mentioned, which had rivets all around the outside edges, and when unlocked, revealed a variety of small cloth-covered drawers for holding coins, petite brass sewing scissors, scraps of silk, and so you see (or more likely you do not see), the more detail I pile on, the less accurate it feels. A memory interpreting a secret.
But my lock is preposterous, especially compared to the beefy locks at the hardware store, whose shackles salute and click their heels as they swing shut. My lock is delicate, a polite request in contrast to the stern warning that hangs from the latch on my shed.
Attached to the “D” there is a separate contraption that looks a bit like a toolbox. The cylindrical handle of the toolbox runs through the loop in the “D” which keeps the lock from swinging open. All together, it gives the impression of a compact torture-device, something that could be clamped around your wrist and tightened slowly to spread the joint apart. It is so precious to me, that in my teen years, I wore its key around my neck. Predictably, I lost the key, and now I have only the lock. I could no more be angry at my teenage-self for misplacing the key than I could be angry at a telephone line for attracting pigeons. Here is a diagram of the toolbox:
When I think of the lock, I think of my poems, which are not really “mine,” since they remain closed and inaccessible, as long as I write them. I may return to them, recognize them, coo at them; I may discover that this or that joint has a little play, or shake them and listen for movement in the interior, but it is endlessly an act of imagination, which surprises no one.
When I think of the lock, I also think of my wife, who sits next to me on the couch, who reads my preposterous poems, and who grieves the death of our old cat in a way that is remarkably similar to the way I grieve, with a few key differences, or distances: I prefer to cry in the car, while she prefers to cry before taking a bite of pasta; I light incense and look at old pictures, while she contemplates the dietary restrictions of kittens.
I like poems that confess a secret, but I also like poems whose circumstance is secret. Where the poem begins. Where the diagram thrives, remains useful, right before the shapes gloom one another with adjacent curiosity. I have questions about the living room, about the image, about my dead cat, about how to manage three names. I am working on losing them all.
Another diagram: the keyhole looks like a table turned on its side. As I recall, the key (which I will not describe) slid in and something clicked and a cylinder slid out.
Cameron Quan Louie is from Tucson, AZ. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. His chapbook, Apology Engine (Gold Line Press, 2022) was the winner of the Gold Line Poetry Chapbook prize in 2020. You can find his work in The Rumpus, jubilat, Sonora Review, Quarterly West, and Best New Poets, among others.