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The ways of creative inspiration are numerous and varied. We are especially interested in the intersections of play and imagination. The interview Michele conducted with the haiku poet and sumi-e artist Lidia Rozmus explores these elements in an imaginary world that nourishes her inner life. The interview is reprinted here from Frogpond 37.2, the spring/summer issue of the journal of the Haiku Society of America.
“Let There Be a Little Country”: A Conversation with Lidia Rozmus
by Michele Root-Bernstein
For many years I have taken interest in the invention of imaginary worlds. In childhood, worldplay, as I call it, often begins in those special places where persistent make-believe happens: a woodland glade, perhaps, or a Lego block house, or a hand-drawn map of a treasure island. In adulthood, imaginary world invention is highly (though not exclusively) associated with the literary arts, with compelling visions of a Wessex or a Middle-earth. I am particularly fascinated by what it takes to evoke the “realness” of a parallel place or paracosm: a skein of associations, a visual image or two, a handful of words? In many of the sumi-e paintings, haiku, and “haibun-ga” of Lidia Rozmus these questions take flight:
full moon
between me and Mole Hill
headless snowman[i]
What follows is an edited version of a conversation with the poet-painter which took place in August 2013 at the Haiku North America Conference held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.
Michele: Lidia, your book Twenty Views from Mole Hill delighted me right from the start with its unusual presentation—a collection of 6-inch-by-6-inch cards held together, not by any kind of binding, but by an intricately folded box. I was also intrigued by this Mole Hill, which served as an artistic touchstone. Here and there in the book you let your readers know that Mole Hill is “not an official geographical name”; that you “see Mole Hill every day from my apartment”; that “from the top of Mole Hill I can see forever.” Mole Hill is a place, certainly. But at some point I began to suspect it was also an imaginary world. Am I right? Is there more to Mole Hill than meets the eye?
Lidia: Yes, of course. At first, Mole Hill was just a hill. The story begins when I moved from the city to the suburbs. At the death of my father I inherited enough money for a down payment on an apartment. I looked north of Chicago at this place on the third floor and it had a big balcony with a breathtaking view of a park with a lake and a hill. I went out on this balcony and then I said to the realtor, I have to have this apartment. Just do everything necessary. I will pay anything. I had to be there, you see. I remember that going back home someone asked me, do you know if there’s a dishwasher? Do you know how many rooms? I had already given an offer—and I said, no. But I knew that it was my place, with its charming hill, which was something interesting in Illinois’s painful flatness.
Almost right away, I started to take photos of the lake and hill from the balcony. Every morning I was running to see the view. It was a wonderful, seasonal experience. Not just watching, but really seeing every day from the same place, you see how things change.
I started to write haiku about Big Bear Lake, which is its real name. I made up the name Mole Hill about two or three years later. It was my molehill and it was my Mole Hill. Then I decided to write Twenty Views from Mole Hill. And the title is, of course, a reference to Hiroshige and his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.[ii] Most of the pieces in my book are about very small and not important events in my life. I call them haibun-ga, which sounds so funny in Polish and in English, too. Haibun refers to the prose plus haiku of the written work and ga, which means picture, refers to the sumi-e (ink drawings). I define haibun-ga as “sumi-e and haibun together on one page.” [iii]
M: So you were playing off of Hiroshige—and playing, too? Creating something parallel to his artistic endeavor, a kind of parody, but also embroidering the reality of your Mole Hill with imaginary dimensions?
L: Oh, yes. Of course, the hai of haiku or haibun means playful. But the book was play from the beginning. Somehow I dare to compare Mole Hill to Fuji! The effort has this charm to it. But Mole Hill is also my reality. You know, as an immigrant from Poland, I spent many years never feeling quite at home. When I found Mole Hill that started to change. I was somehow politically angry with what was going on in Poland and in America. And I said, gosh, do I have to emigrate again? No, I will not start from the beginning. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I have my republic; I have my Republic of Mole Hill. It’s mine. And it will always be just mine. That may be selfish of me, but everyone will be welcome. I can share this place. It makes me laugh to think, you know, others can have green cards, but they can’t be citizens—just me, because I was chosen by all the animals that are living there.
M: Citizen Rozmus, that has a nice ring to it.
L:
L:
M: Oh, too bad! You must have been channeling Jorge Luis Borgès. He wrote a story in which a bogus country is entered into a reprint of Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The fictitious literature of this Uqbar is, in turn, comprised of counterfeit fantasies based on imaginary regions of an imaginary planet. And so on down the tunnels of the mind: feigned philosophies, anthropologies, biologies, geometries, and geographies all describe the intimate laws of a para-cosmos. Borgès’s narrator surmises that the dreamers responsible for this incredible labyrinth would end by changing “the face of the world”[v]—the real one, presumably—or our perception of it.
L: Well, it so happens that eight years ago, though I try not to be political, I was worried. I had lost hope in the human race. The pain in the daily news—you can’t in this world be completely happy. Sometimes it’s so overwhelming you just sit and cry, because you are powerless. And I remember saying to myself, what are you going crazy about, you have Mole Hill. Everything is okay in the Republic of Mole Hill. It’s like comfort food, a comfort place. Mole Hill, somehow, is escape, is solace. I’ve never drawn a map of Mole Hill, but it’s everything I can see from the balcony. On the one hand, it’s somehow reality, with an imaginary name, but on another hand, it’s an imaginary world that does not exist; it’s part of a park.
M: And yet, judging from your website, the imaginary dimensions are real enough.
L: Yes, I put up some of the pictures I have taken from my balcony, at different times of the year. And I describe Mole Hill, its population and so forth. I want one of my friends, a musician and composer, to compose an anthem for Mole Hill. Also, I want postmarks. I even thought about money, but I said, no, this is a pure country—no money! I imagine an ideal little place, somewhat on the lines of the “little country” described by Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching.
M: Ah, the chapter on “Freedom”:[vi] “Let there be a little country without many people.” They’d have ships but make no journeys; weapons but make no war. They’d take pleasure in food, their homes and customs and “get old and die” without ever having wanted for more. You know, Lidia, this so interesting! This might almost be a description of my daughter’s play when she was nine and twelve and sixteen—or a précis of the imaginary countries invented by any number of well-known writers, artists, or scientists: the Brontë siblings, for sure, but also writer-philosopher Stanislaw Lem, sculptor Claes Oldenburg, and zoologist-painter Desmond Morris. Did you play this way when you were a child?
L: It’s been so long it’s hard to remember. There was a lot of the imaginary in my play, perhaps because we lacked toys when I was a child in Poland and we had to make our toys by ourselves. When we played at “stores” where someone was selling and buying things, I remember using the leaves of the lilac as money. Other than this kind of play, however, I don’t remember having had an imaginary world of such proportions.
M: And, yet, as an adult…
L: It’s somehow very important.
M: For all of us, I imagine. We all enter into imaginary worlds daily, don’t we, whenever we suspend disbelief in the fictions of literature, art, dance, history, philosophy, or science?
L: I have been thinking about this. Is it just escaping from reality? Not much, because I don’t have a lot of reasons to escape from reality. So far my reality is something that I accept and sometimes even like. But always in my life I have been pretty skeptical and I have asked myself what is real, what is unreal, and how is time playing with us? What of quantum physics, with its parallel worlds? I believe that we don’t know a lot of things. And it’s very possible there’s another earth where there is life like here. Sometimes I joke that on another world or earth, I am doing this or that. But it’s not just joking; somewhere in this there’s a moment of possibility. Who can tell if it’s one hundred percent true that our reality is not our dream and vice versa?
M: You refer, don’t you, to the now famous speculation of the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhaungzi or Zhuang Zhou, who dreamed he was a butterfly and, upon awakening, did not know if he was then a man dreaming himself a butterfly or was now a butterfly dreaming itself a man. The theme has reverberated down through the haiku ages.
L: Exactly. There’s nothing new in what I’m saying. A lot of people, a lot of physicists are thinking this way. You and I can somehow imagine worlds in four dimensions, when they, the physicists, are talking about thirty-something dimensions. Scientists are like contemporary philosophers because they speculate but they can’t prove. For me, that’s philosophy and it has an impact on my art and my approach to reality. Because I’m not just here, you know. I once had a real experience merging with the universe—nothing particularly rare, lots of people have such a moment at some time in their lives. In my case, I found myself in a place where it was dark enough to see at night an almost white sky full of stars. And I wrote,
starry night
I’m here
and there
I was thinking then what I’m talking about now. What is here and there? Everything! It’s happened in my life that I feel very much part of the cosmos. I feel like a child of the universe.
M: You mentioned that the possible worlds of philosophers and scientists have affected your work. Can you speak to the role that Mole Hill may play in your art—is it central or peripheral to your artistic effort as a whole?
L: In my sumi-e and some of my haiku, of course, and in some of my latest oils, which are abstract, I try to paint microcosms. Thinking about microcosms I’m thinking about inside the tree or inside the blade of grass, something smaller than an atom. I believe in the string theory—
M: In which all the fundamental particles of the universe—electrons, protons, quarks and more—are different oscillations of the same string?
L: Yes. I try to paint this. And if I think about where this is happening, I think of Mole Hill, the nature I find there. The paintings are abstract, but the place, the idea, is somehow real. It’s also unreal because nobody actually sees the strings. Yet somehow I imagine this and I place it in Mole Hill—in a few brush strokes, which are coming from my inside, my intuition. The brain and heart start to work later, but first it’s this something that I have inside. Then I start to make rational these paintings, to name them, and I think about Mole Hill; I take energy from the water there.
M: Your art doesn’t take place in an imaginary world, but it’s tied with strings to the imaginary world?
L: Yes.
M: All of your artwork?
L: Sometimes not. I just try to follow my intuition. Sometimes I can’t name the inspiration or track it back to Mole Hill. Sometimes my imagination gets going later—many times when I’m writing haiku:
on the Mole Hill
Milky Way
the only way
I imagine seeing this; being there. Not just the microcosmos, but the cosmos, too, is present in Mole Hill.
M: Mole Hill is all encompassing, as big as your imagination can make it.
L: Yes. I feel comfortable with this, that it’s imaginary. I’ll let you know when my friend who is a psychiatrist says no more Mole Hill!
M: Not any time soon, I hope! As chargé d’affaires, I’m planning to send you bulletins from BirdGirl Garden.
L: This is great! Who says you have to have things to have a wonderful life! When they dress us in white, at least we will be in the same hospital!
M: Seriously now. Can we talk a bit about your upcoming exhibition?
L: I’m preparing now a multimedia exhibition to be called Views from Mole Hill. Right now, the exhibition is scheduled for March 20, 2015 at the Polish Museum of America in Chicago. There will be around 140 photographs to document what I see from the balcony. I will also have some oils and sumi-e and haiga[vii] and haiku. I’m going to corral friends and poets into writing haiku about Mole Hill and I want to paint haiga to this haiku—all towards publishing a small anthology celebrating the Republic. During the exhibition I want people to read haiku and, as I mentioned, I’ve commissioned a Mole Hill anthem. I said to my composer friend, you know, just a little piece like Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”!
M. Naturally! You are reminding me of J.R.R. Tolkien, who I’m sure you know also indulged in the private hobby of world invention, composing just about every aspect of an imaginary history for an imaginary Middle-earth—languages, legends, and landscapes, not to mention the maps, chronologies, and high adventures captured in The Hobbit and in Lord of the Rings. Over sixty years ago he suggested that some American museum should devote a gallery or two to imaginary worlds as a “New Art, or New Game” worthy of recognition.[viii] Your upcoming exhibition sounds very much along those lines—and might inspire more of us to embrace our secret, inner lands.
L. Why not? When I talk about why I have this Mole Hill, some people say, oh, god, it’s a great idea. And I say, you can have your Mole Hill, too. You can imagine. They say, oh, I love one part of my garden, I can name this. And from there, I say, you can have an imaginary place. Mole Hill started from a real thing, but the Republic of Mole Hill is completely imaginary.
I’m joking and I’m laughing, but it’s important. I think that everybody alive has their own stories, their own imaginary worlds. These may seem nothing special, but somehow they are necessary to survive.
M. Before we go, do you have a favorite Mole Hill haibun-ga?
L: Each haibun-ga calls up so many memories and places from the past, I can hardly choose. Perhaps this one:
The day after the meadow was mowed around Mole Hill, the aroma of yesterday’s flowers and grasses is everywhere. Now they’re drying in the sun, just inviting me to lie down and observe the white clouds flowing, changing their shapes and meanings. Grasshoppers everywhere; they’re breaking Olympic jumping records.
Blessed laziness, memories, and this aroma.
summer noon
grass and song bird
so high[ix]
M: I love the sense of reverie you impart; the invitation to observe not just what is real, as in the clouds, but what is beyond real.
L: Yes. It is for this that I open Twenty Views with
first snow
I turn the lights off—
to see[x]
Notes
[i] Lidia Rozmus, Twenty Views from Mole Hill: The Last Haibun-Ga of the Twentieth Century (Evanston, IL: Deep North Press, 1999), 8.
[ii] Hiroshige (1797-1858) produced two series of woodblock prints collected under this title in 1852 and 1858. His Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji recalled an identically titled collection by Hokusai (1760-1849), whose woodblock prints on the subject were composed between 1826 and 1833.
[iii] Rozmus, Twenty Views from Mole Hill, author’s preface. See also, Rozmus, “The Mystery of Haibun-ga,” Modern Haiku 42.2 (summer 2011): 80-81.
[iv] Editor of Modern Haiku from 2006-2013.
[v] Jorge Luis Borgès, ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings (Trans. various), (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2007/1962), 18.
[vi] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way. Trans. Ursula K. Le Guin (with J.P. Seaton) (Boston: Shambhala, 1998), 100-101.
[vii] Haiga refers to the combination of pictorial image and haiku in the same frame. Image and word do not illustrate or repeat, but resonate with one another.
[viii] J.R.R. Tolkien, “A Secret Vice” (initially titled “A Hobby for the Home”). In Christopher Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 198.
[ix] Rozmus, Twenty Views from Mole Hill, 18.
[x] Ibid., 4.
Born in Poland, Lidia Rozmus has lived in the United States since 1980 and works as a graphic designer, teacher, painter, sumi-e artist, and haiku poet. In addition to illustrating dozens of books and chapbooks, Lidia has published four books of her own graphic work and poetry and has shown her sumi-e and haiga throughout the U.S., Poland, Japan, and Australia. She is art editor of the journal Modern Haiku. (www.lidiarozmus.com)
Michele Root-Bernstein studies and writes about creativity across the life cycle, recently completing the book Inventing Imaginary Worlds: From Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the Arts and Sciences (2014). She also composes haiku, haibun, and the occasional haiga, some of which appear in North American journals and in A New Resonance 6. Currently, she serves as associate editor of Frogpond and as minor diplomat to countries of the mind.
(c) 2015 Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein
