Petit Caillou. Home-cosmography

"Scrute tes paupières", me disait ma mère, penchée sur mon avant-sommeil d'écolier. J'apercevais flottant un petit caillou, tantôt paresseux, tantôt strident, un galet pour verdir dans l'herbe. Je pleurais. Je l'eusse voulu dans mon âme et seulement là. 

René Char, Lettera amorosa

Direct your sight inward, and you'll find

A thousand regions in your mind

Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be

Expert in home-cosmography. 

Henry David Thoreau
Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Image : Amy Judd

Covering the Universe with Drawings. Anne-Marie Fiquet's Cartography

Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had a map of his fields engraved in his soul.

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.

Chacun devrait alors dire ses routes, ses carrefours, ses bancs. Chacun devrait dresser le cadastre de ses campagnes perdues.

Gaston Bachelard 

Anne-Marie Fiquet Art on paper

La vie dans les bois. The Perfect Boots to Walk Around Thoreau's Pond

Our life is frittered away by detail.

 Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854* 

You are incorrigible. Since you saw those foldable japanese rubber boots on Swiss-miss blog, you can't help thinking of them. These japanese wellies were initially designed to answer the need of space in many japanese homes. Rolled down and secured with a heavy-weight rubber band, they take up little more space than a pair of Cinderella shoes. You want to believe Henry David Thoreau himself would not have been averse to counting them as one of his few possessions but really you know you are cheating yourself. 

* The Thoreau reader annotated works by H. D. Thoreau, Chapter 2 Where I lived, and what I lived for

Foldable rubber boots at Kaufmann Mercantile 

1 Thoreau's cove, Lake Walden, Concord, Massachusetts, 1900-1910. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Rêve d'eau. Caroushka Streijffert's Summer House in Stockholm Archipelago

Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6  Caroushka Streijffert's summer house by photographer Martin Löf

7, 8, 9   Caroushka Streijffert, Objects

10 Caroushka Streijffert, Patterns, Number Count Counting Numbers, Collage and ink patterns on paper, 

© Carouschka 2001

Links:  Interior architect and artist  Caroushka Streijffert

Simplicity (1) Nomadic House by Martin Azua

Martín Azúa 1999 / Photographs Daniel Riera

Barcelona designer  Martín Azúa challenges the idea of the private home with the Basic House - an inhabitable volume that is "foldable, inflatable and reversible." Made from metalized polyester, the Basic House is a shelter small enough to fit in your pocket, allowing you to break away from the imprisonment of material ties and to reconnect to some primal instinct. 

"We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion, any portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. " Henry David Thoreau Walden; or, Life in The Woods, 1854.