Day 383-385-If Bookshelves Be Your Gardens

Make books your companions; 

let your bookshelves be your gardens; 

bask in their beauty, 

gather their fruit, 

pluck their roses,

take their spices and myrrh.

------------------Samuel Ibn Tibbons

(Quote handwritten in the Old Man's journal)

8 days had passed before I finally took a break from the colour pigments. By then, I had managed to extract and even begun mixing the powders to create new colours and then shades of each colour.  If not for the fact that I eventually ran out of bowls to put my colours in, I would have continued for the sheer pleasure of discovering colours the likes of which I had never thought existed. I mean, they are still primarily the colours we know, but I swear the opalescence of the blues or the florescence of my yellows and the iridescence of each hue, they are almost surreal! 

I must stop, I told myself or I will start wanting to live only in this psychedelic consciousness. 

So I stopped and I went home but of course, I couldn't leave the colours. My mind was constantly flashing riotous paint pigments, in splashes, blotches and swatches. 

I turned to my books for distractions but I found myself picking only art books, old books that I have collected over the years. There was a series on Iznik ceramics, one on Persian paintings and a few with illustrated stories like the 1001 Nights, all filled with colours. I tried to read but everything I read only made me longed harder for that world that I was desperately seeking a respite from. 

I gave up, threw my hands in the air in surrender but I sternly told myself: No more mixing colours! At least for a week! 

That was how I went back;

and that was how I came to build those bookshelves. 

With a now familiar resolve, I had intentionally brought the big and heavy art books to the house, firmly believing that I could use them to keep my hands off the mixing bench. Let me tell you, these books are so big and heavy that you will need two strong hands to read each book with no hands left to do anything else.

I had of course forgotten how the house was really not very conducive for reading. There was no comfortable seat, dim lighting and no place to store my precious old books.

The light bulb moment came when I saw this old drawer. I thought I found my 3 in 1 solution. By converting it into a small window seat cum shelf for my books, I had found a comfortable seat with good lighting at the window and a proper place to store my precious books. 

Fortuitously, I also got to play with my colours. The piece of old cloth I had used to make the seat was dyed with every colour I had made in that 8 days. Once the colours were applied, it was as if the cloth was brought to life. I could feel the pulse of its vibrancy. The newness of the seat was then contrasted with a pair of aged but sturdy floral wood carvings used to adorn the sides of the shelf. The shelf cum seat now echoes the bookstand at the mixing bench. 

I couldn't help sighing with pleasure when I looked at my completed bookshelf. If that seat was a painting, it would have been an abstract depicting a bed of spring flowers. I know it is ridiculous to see a mere seat like that but there's something about those colours that just made me think Art.

I was so high on the art of bookshelves that I decided I should also do something to house the collection of horticultural periodicals and gardening books which the old man had left behind. 

His was a collection of even older works. Due to the neglect and exposure to the elements, many  had to be thrown out. Yet, I managed to still salvage quite a few and kept all the interesting ones, the most important being his journal. 

I spent twice as long building his bookshelf because I was reading so much. 

There was this batch of periodicals that I was particularly  taken with. They were on old botanica illustrations. I actually spent hours reading and studying quite a few of them because there was something odd about those illustrations. It eventually came to me. 

The illustrations were originally printed in black and white. Colours of the drawings were subsequently added by hand. Once or twice, some pigments actually came off onto my fingers and I  noticed that they were very similar to the ones that I had extracted.

Could it be that the old man added those colours?

I can appreciate how frustrating it must have been to him to look at the flowers he was so familiar with in greyscale when he could identify the colours down to its precise shade. Part of his attempts at mixing the colours himself might have been his striving for that shade he wanted to anoint the flowers in his books with.

For the first time, I felt like I finally understood this man. His books revealed for me more of him than any other things in this house did. 

A day later, I reluctantly put the books away and started working on his shelf. 

It was a different experience, building the old man's bookshelf. Apart from the obvious, like how it only took me one day to build mine and two days to build his, I felt too that my motivations were different. My bookshelf was intended as a nook of respite, a place I could snuggle up to read and dream with quick access to my books. I built it casual and comfortable. 

The old man's bookshelf however was like a temple, built to enshrine books which I obviously felt were even more precious than mine. Flowers and plants were added, both as a homage to the old man who loved them and as a tribute for his relentless pursuit of their exact hue.

If my bookshelf was a bed of spring flowers, then I built his to be the hanging gardens of Babylon. 

5 weeks after I finished building these bookshelves, I found the quote by Samuel ibn Tibbons in the Old Man's journal. 

The Old Man also scribbled : If bookshelves be your gardens....

That day, I wrote my 1st words in the journal, right below those lines: 

If you should chance upon our gardens; you may wish to sit a while. And when you hear our roses speak, don't be alarm. For miracles and magic is commonplace; and all that they want to do is to tell  you who we are. That we are merely, the old man and I,  an artist and a gardener; and lovers of colours and plants.