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For this very special Quotomania debut of Ian Boyden’s unpublished poem “Assay,” Boyden shared a short statement on the work:

“I’m so delighted you are going to read my poem ‘Assay’ as part of your Quotomania project. It might seem strange, but in an important way, this is precisely how I want this poem to enter the world—delivered by the voice of someone other than myself (and yet not an Other). And that it is your voice, a voice I have come to love so much, that makes it even better.

“Why do I feel this way? This poem is a record of an experience, that of the gradual breakdown of the “illusory self” that somehow forms as we grow, perhaps in the way a hard crust grows on lava as it cools. The generation of the illusory self is a response to some external condition. And somehow in this process a separation occurs, as if part of us were trapped to one side of the crust, and the other part to the other. I don’t know if there is a singular reason for this. But a theory I am fond of is that our conscious mind is somehow captured by language, this sense of ‘I’ made rigid by the insistence of language itself. And with ‘I’ comes ‘non-I.’ Thus, the mentality of ‘we-they’ is born. The Other.

“Think about this, Paul, language might be a separate temperature from who we fundamentally are. When we expose ourselves to this extraordinary tool of communication, it changes our state of matter. What was transparent might become opaque, what was liquid might become solid. Great eruptions of steam and fog. Calcium carbonate precipitates to form some dense shell. And somehow consciousness separates. And then it begins to perceive our world as through the lens of separation.

“You asked me to suggest quotations, and here is one from Sam Hamill in this regard that I love. It comes from his essay ‘The Necessity to Speak’:

Nothing will change until we demolish the ‘we-they’ mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal.

“Many years ago, I had a profound experience in which the boundary between myself and my environment shattered. I saw quite clearly that I was not separate from my environment. That, in fact, I was my environment, that we are our environment. What we do to our environment, we do to ourselves. And this revelation has been at the heart of my work for the last decade or more. And at the same time, this revelation also illuminated a similar internal illusion, an illusory I that is somehow separate from who we fundamentally are. What is our fundamental self or fundamental disposition?

“There is a famous Zen koan that speaks to the importance, really the revelatory quality of knowing that fundamental disposition. When the seven century Zen master Hongren declared Huineng his dharma heir, it created an intense controversy among the monks at his temple. Some of them were so angry that they wanted to kill Huineng, causing Huineng to flee for his life. One of Hongren’s other disciples, a head monk named Ming, pursued Huineng and finally caught up with him in the mountains. In a life-or-death situation, Huineng asked Ming this question: ‘Without thinking of right, without thinking of wrong, at this very moment, what is your original disposition?’ Disposition is a wonderful word in Chinese meaning literally ‘face and eyes.’ Upon being asked this question, head monk Ming experiences a massive opening, recognizes Huineng as the rightful dharma heir and lets him go on his way. And Huineng’s question has become a question asked of every student of Zen ever since.

“What is your original disposition? It is such a severe question. That original disposition of the flowing lava before the blinding crust. What is your fundamental nature? How do you penetrate the crust to see it? How do you go about knowing that? It seems to defy all logical structures. So, this poem documents an aspect of my experience in that search.

“And this brings me to the title ‘Assay.’ This can be either a verb or a noun. I prefer the title be understood as a verb, though I also have no intention of limiting it to one or another. It means to test the quality of a metal, and by extension to assess the nature of a given thing. When I was a child, I identified with Hephaestus, I loved that he lived in a volcano forging metal, I even wrote my first book about him at age 7 or 8. And later, I even moved to Sicily where I climbed Mount Etna, Hephaestus’ home! And then later, I worked in a bronze foundry, where I performed assays many times. So I felt this word fit perfectly with my own cosmology. But then I began to feel unease, because Jane Hirshfield, who is one of my favorite poets and who I count as a dear friend, has used this word in the title of a great number of her poems, a kind of formula: {X}: An Assay. So, I wrote to her, asking her if she would mind, and she wrote back a lovely note, saying, ‘you more than have my blessing, didn’t need my blessing, but I still appreciate you inquiring, because I might, after all, have felt otherwise.’”

Bio:

Ian Boyden—artist, writer, translator, and curator—investigates relationships between the self and the environment, in particular how art and writing can shape our ecology. Consistent across his productions are his interests in material relevance and place-based thought, as well as a deep awareness of East Asian philosophies and aesthetics. He studied for many years in China and Japan, and holds degrees in the History of Art from Wesleyan University and Yale University. In recent years, he has worked extensively with Chinese dissidents, including artist Ai Weiwei and poet Tsering Woeser. He is the recipient of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the NEA to translate the work of Woeser. He is the author of A Forest of Names: 108 Meditations (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), and his artist books, paintings, and sculptures are found in many public collections including Reed College, Stanford University, the Portland Art Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

From www.ianboyden.com.

For more information about Ian Boyden:

“‘Eradicate the Self’ Self Portrait”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYCJVLVHrF0

A Forest of Names: https://www.weslpress.org/9780819579959/a-forest-of-names/

“A Landscape of Dignity: A Conversation with Ai Weiwei and Ian Boyden”: https://www.raintaxi.com/a-landscape-of-dignity-a-conversation-with-ai-weiwei-and-ian-boyden/

“The Nature of Names: A Conversation with Ian Boyden”: https://theadroitjournal.org/2020/09/24/the-nature-of-names-a-conversation-with-ian-boyden/

Translations of “Assay”:

Swedish translation by Charlotta Smeds:

Skärskåda

I åratal hamrade jag

på en vägg runt mitt hjärta

och när den äntligen rasade

fann jag att varelsen inom mig

var densamma

som höll i hammaren

hela tiden

—Ian Boyden

Italian translation by Charlotta Smeds:

Scrutare

Per anni ho preso a martellate

il muro attorno al mio cuore

e quando alla fine è crollato

ho trovato che l'essere al suo interno

era lo stesso

che aveva tenuto il martello

per tutto il tempo

—Ian Boyden

Chinese translation by Danhong Tang:

證顯

多年來我錘打著

一堵環繞我心的牆

當它終於碎崩時

我發現裡面的眾生

與那個握著錘子的生物

一直是一樣的

—Ian Boyden