A touchstone is first defined as a fundamental feature. Next as a criterion for determining the genuineness of a thing; a definition originating from the streak a hunk of black siliceous stone leaves behind when rubbed against gold in a test of it’s purity. Touch stone, quite literally.
It’s a word I thought of earlier this winter while reading Meghan Gilliss’ Lungfish1 per my childhood sister-friend’s recommendation. Friends and family members are often reluctant to offer reading suggestions (I have peculiar literary tastes, as this newsletter can attest to), but I was thrilled when Emily sent me a note about Gillis’ novel set on an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine. She declared it read like poetry and I should absolutely read it. I added Lungfish to my hold list at the library—starting a text chain with Emily to let her know when I had begun. I wasn’t looking for what would be between the novels pages, it was for the tether to Emily and the possibility of meaningful communication.
I often find it challenging to keep in touch. Reading offers a method for doing so; the plot, the characters, the prose of Lungfish each offering an entry point to conversation. Allowing me to avoid the exhaustive preamble, What’s new? Christ, I don’t know. Everything. Where to begin?
When text becomes touchstone, it offers a common ground for the parties sharing it. And because text is composed of language, it’s not too hyperbolic to extrapolate that perhaps the touchstone at large is language itself. This becomes a strong example in marginalized communities pushed to the fringes where they were once central. The Zuni is one of the most intact indigenous American tribes in existence with an estimated population of ten thousand, ninety percent of whom reside at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. Anthropologists credit the community’s strength to their native language providing an ethnic identity point. But tribal leaders worry the language of Zuni is disappearing, which would align it with an estimated one hundred and forty Native American languages already lost. In her article for the Smithsonian, author and scientist Virginia Morell quotes Zuni priest Edison Vicenti, saying “If we lose our language, we lose the base of our religion and culture. And if we lose our religion, we lose what binds us together as Zuni. It is like the roots of a tree; if the tree is uprooted or the roots contaminated, then it dies. It is the same with us.”2 Without language as a touchstone of identity, its loss becomes inevitable.
The poet Natalie Díaz has worked extensively with elder speakers of the Mojave language on its proliferation. Her writing is “tied to the tensions between her three languages: Mojave, Spanish and English.”3 In writing from this triad, she develops a personal lexicon expanded by her criticism of poetic craft—a questioning of traditional form and “mastery.” In a parallel manifestation, craft acts alongside language as a secondary pillar to the Zuni community. This time being the craft of ceramics; potters shape their work from clay collected in a location long used by the tribe. The technique was passed down by community members who helped revive ceramics as an art form after plastic and metal pans contributed to its diminishment. The new generations’ return to an age-old art form was facilitated by a lasting connection to their ancestral land, a case for the power of the Land Back movement— “putting Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands.”4 Zuni clay offers the organic potential needed for the community to continue their craft. In her collection Postcolonial Love Poem, Díaz writes “In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same - because why would you want what you don’t need?”5
If you’ve ever taken a ceramics lesson, you’ll have noticed how similar clay feels to raw earth in your hands. My first time sitting at a wheel I was surprised to experience the feeling similar to that of gardening—arms elbow deep in soil and silt collecting underneath my fingernails. My aunts have taken pottery classes together for nearly two decades; the weight of their coiled pieces atop my kitchen cabinets conjures an elemental permanence. Serving salad from one of their bowls brings me slightly closer to said permanence, and through it to my Aunts themselves. Similarly, a wooden spoon a friend carved offers more than its slight weight when stirring a pot of noodles or agitating garlic to keep it from burning. Craft historian Glenn Adamson expressed this sentiment well in his book Fewer, Better Things, “Let’s not think of things as ends in themselves, props to put on the mantelpiece. Rather, let’s consider them as points of contact between people. Every object represents a potential social connection.”6 Heirlooms offer this connection point in a specifically talismanic way, allowing us to remain in contact with those no longer in our living world. I inherited a fair amount of heirlooms early in my twenties after losing my paternal grandparents. From the secretary desk I’m currently typing on to an aluminum pot with a base so thin its contents consistently scald, even on the lowest gas setting; I love them both the same.
When my partner, Alex, and I moved out of our last apartment, I had a pile of laundry I was waiting to pack which included some of my most cherished garments. On the top was one such heirloom: my Nana’s Pongee Silk Robe, likely woven in 1920s Japan but imported through China. I’m unsure how it came to her, an Italian immigrant living in the greater Boston area with an aversion to travel, but it suited her well: black hair pulled taut in a braided bun with fabric draping off her shoulders. A slub-woven fabric, Pongee is constructed with yarns spun of varying tightness resulting in a matte and unreflective, yet very fine, silk. Her robe was printed with florals across the shoulders that tapered off into a golden wash of color through the chest until coming alive once more in greenery around its hem. The silhouette was similar to a kimono with large, open sleeves which appeared to be dipped into a pattern of vivid botanics themselves. The vintage silk was too delicate to wear outside the apartment, but sometimes I’d slip it on after showering so I could spend time with my Nana through its threads. Painting on lipstick before a night out and pondering what she’d think of the red sauce recipe I’d been developing, chasing after the one I could hardly remember from childhood.
In the final moments of packing in preparation for our move, I put the robe—along with the pile it resided upon—in a garbage bag. We’d run out of boxes days before, and bags had taken their place. During the ensuing weeks of unpacking, I realized the garbage bag had likely been mistaken for actual garbage at some point along the way. I scoured the closets of our new, still rather barren, apartment for months. Desperately peering behind doors, returning again and again to the storage bin by the boiler; I pled for an aberration.
My Nana was a devout astrologist for as long as I can remember, and I feel kinship in both our Sun signs being Gemini. She once whispered to me behind a cupped palm that my weakness lies in Pisces, my Moon sign—dictator of my emotions. Alex and I have been in our apartment for nearly three years now; each time I find myself hopelessly searching the storage area beneath our stairs, I blame Pisces.
Out for a birthday dinner last summer with one of my closest friends, Jean, I opened my present while sitting across the table from her. Inside was a Pongee silk robe, its pattern purple and red where Nana’s had been green and orange. Irises bloomed up from the hem, reaching toward a delicate motif encircling the shoulders. When I had first confided the extent of my devastation over the loss to Jean she needed no explanation, innately understanding the emotional symbolism. The robe in my lap was a new type of inheritance, not a replacement, but instead an offering from a friend which softened the void its predecessor had left behind.
The more varied the conduits, the richer I’ve found my relationships to become—be they through the gauge of a Pongee silk robe or the pages of an experimental novel. The poet and professor Mary Ruefle wrote in her collected lectures Madness, Rack and Honey, “we are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.”7 She was speaking specifically about the power of reading for extending time, for “one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single life span,” but I think also she is talking about the connections we can find with each other off the page. About how a common story, or the bookshelf it resides upon, can become a mutual point of contact between two people living separate lives. Each offering a touchstone across time zones and temporal stretches where life gets so busy we don’t think to pick up the phone. Or, as Díaz puts it, “To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.”
SUGGESTED READING: TEXT AS TOUCHSTONE
01.A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter // I’ve had countless conversations over the years with my friend James about what we’re reading, but this novel bears testament to the strength of his recommendations. Set in France in the 1960s, the story of an erotic love affair unfolds in turns, witnessed and fantasized through the eyes of our unnamed narrator.
02.What We Keep, Jean Lin // If the anecdote included in this newsletter doesn’t illustrate Jean’s authority on the subject of meaningful objects, I don’t know what does. Available for pre-order now, “What We Keep” encourages readers to consider objects in their own lives through a new lens, unraveling each collector’s unique narrative and the beautiful objects that embody it. All captured by the inimitable Brooke Holm, the pages include studio visits with makers and artists alongside interior shots from within collector’s homes.
03.The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera // I first read this book wanting to understand the character Sabine whom Alex had tattooed onto his left bicep. I read his undergrad copy, delighting in the handwritten notes of which I have many favorites—his frequent bowler hat illustrations, intellectual questions directed to himself (“fuckin’ weird, right?”) and the fervent underlining of each and every sex scene.
04.Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine // Grace and I do not need a literary touchstone, considering that we see each other at least three days a week at work. Instead we have many points of reference, often swapping books back and forth. Of all the books I’ve loaned from her, I’ve chosen to include Rankine’s lyric confrontation with our culture for how her clarity and intelligence blew me away.
05.Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver // My Mom wanted to lend me this book, but first her best friend Julie had to read it. I read Kingsolver’s year of abandoning the industrial-food pipeline in Spring last year, prime time for it to become the catalyst for many gardening conversations with my mother. Still a novice in my own right, I was tempering an aphid infestation all last summer. Mom explained it was likely exacerbated by my inclusion of broccoli in the planting bed. I also had squash bugs and didn’t catch them till they deflated my squash plant overnight. While I certainly am not sustaining myself off the few vegetables being grown, I plan to try again this Summer—no broccoli this time.
06.Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, adrienne maree brown // I’m sure my friend Jordan’s high school students adore her, she’s a natural teacher whom I count myself lucky to learn from. She’s gifted me many incredible books for birthdays over the years, but this one I bought a copy of after the third time she brought it up in conversation. Author and editor adrienne maree brown explores the concept of “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness, through a series of essays and conversations tackling subjects from sex work to climate change.
Meghan Gilliss. “Lungfish.” Catapult, 2022.
Virginia Morell. “The Zuni Way.” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2007.
Sandeep Parmer. “Natalie Diaz: It is an important and dangerous time for language.” The Guardian, 2 July 2020.
Land Back Movement, 2021, https://landback.org/.
Natalie Diaz. “Postcolonial Love Poem.” Graywolf Press, 2020.
Glens Adamson. “Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects.” Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
Mary Ruefle. “Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures.” Wave Books, 2012.