I keep a bag of ugly smalti from a demolished hotel floor
About four kilos of the stuff, in a canvas bag under the trestle. It came out of a hotel on Egnatia that got gutted years ago, I talked the foreman into letting me take the floor tiles before the skip arrived. Half of it is a green nobody would choose, that 1970s hospital green, and the pieces are too big and irregular to set nicely without recutting every one.
I have used maybe a dozen of them in eight years. Every so often I tip the bag out on the floor and look at it for twenty minutes and put it back. My friend Eleni says throw it, and she is right in the practical sense, but the green is not a colour you can buy. It is a bad green and it is the only place in the world it exists now.
Started a piece last week where I finally cut into a proper chunk of it. The dust smelled like a wet wall. Two days later it is still the wrong colour in the composition, but cutting it felt good, so it stays for now.
Anyone else hoarding a material they know they will probably never finish using?
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This I understand very well, ji. I have a bundle of old cloth in my cupboard, from my mother's time, the dye gone faded and patchy. Not good for selling, not good for teaching. But when I open it and see those colours, something comes back which I cannot explain in words. Your green also is like that. It is not only material, it is memory of that place which is now gone. Material can be bought again from shop, but that particular green from that floor, nobody can make it again. Keep it. Maybe after some years one work will come where only that green will fit, and then you will know why you were not throwing it.
Mm, "not good for selling, not good for teaching." That's the shelf most of my best cloth lives on. I've got two flour sacks of my grandmother's, dyed with something she never wrote down, and one of them is this muddy purple that has no business being pretty and is anyway.
Far as I'm concerned that hotel floor already got torn out once. You keeping a sack of it in the house is the only reason the green still exists. Eleni can throw out her half.
Muddy purple that has no business being pretty. Yes. You understand the bag then.
And thank you for the bit about the hotel floor already being torn out once. I had not thought of it that way and now I cannot unthink it. The green survives because it is in my house. Fine. It stays.
The flour sacks though, those are better than my smalti and you know it. Dye nobody wrote down is a whole other category of stubborn. Do you ever take them out just to look, or are they properly retired?
Ji, the cloth that is no good for selling and no good for teaching, exactly. That is the whole category. Nobody values it, so it stays honest somehow.
You are right that nobody can make that green again. That is the part I keep circling. The glass comes from a factory that no longer exists, in a shade they stopped caring about, and it sat in a floor of a hotel that people walked on for thirty years before anyone thought to look at it. You cannot order that.
Eleni will not be happy with you for taking my side, by the way. But I will keep it. And I will think of your mother's cloth next time I tip the bag out on the floor.