Architect Arthur Erickson designed many notable buildings across Canada, Asia, and the Middle East. While I was studying architecture in India, he was the only Canadian architect we knew of (besides Romi Khosla, who worked in Montreal), as Erickson had appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine (the pinnacle of celebrity status in the 1980s). During his last visit to the Canadian capital, Ottawa, Arthur Erickson and I had a conversation on the stage of the National Gallery of Canada. The hall was full, and those standing had to leave. We sat facing each other; neither of us had any papers or books to refer to. The conversation was guided by slides of the work he had chosen for the event.
Towards the end of our chat, Erickson recalled how inspired he was growing up in Vancouver and exploring nature trails every weekend: “We had a grandmother… she went so far as to say if I am reborn, I would like to be reborn as a native because I think they are the only ones who understood the landscape.”
I couldn’t help but ask this doyen of Canadian architecture:
“What would you like to be reborn as?”
“Eh?”
He hadn’t expected to be asked about his possible reincarnation, so I repeated the question. He felt silent, and the audience held their breath. After a pin-drop silence, he said,
“Oh! I don’t want to say an elephant, but they do get their way.”
Erickson’s witty, though unexpected response, highlights what makes architecture such a worthwhile pursuit.
Elephants are renowned for their long-term memory, and architecture aims for a timelessness that surpasses that of elephants. Memory and memorable are intertwined in Arthur Erickson’s work.
When the laughter died down, I recited my decade-old Elephant poem to him. As an oral poet, I composed poems in my head, where they resided and that I would recall as part of everyday conversations. My standing quip was that if you believe you descended from the first cousins of apes, we oral poets descended from elephants that have genetically “Forgotten / How to forget.”
~
Elephant
Inarticulate
Blob of ink;
Nose and tail
Out of scale,
Ears that would be
Wings.White tusks precede
The body’s darkness
Scanning eyes
Record the world.Mind does not erase,
Does not overwrite;
Celebrates the excess
Of memory
With the memory
Of excess:No bigness
Is big enoughWhen you have
Forgotten
How to forget.
~
When we finished, the positive energy in the room was tangible. Although his mind had slowed at 82, his work still managed to enchant. As we received the standing ovation from four hundred attendees, Arthur Ericson affectionately pressed my shoulder. I didn’t realise at the time how memorable that moment would be.
Two years later, he died, and four years after our conversation, “Elephant” was published in my book of animal poems, Alphabestiary, with exegesis by Bruce Meyer. We both ended up at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. The poem begins with an architect and calligrapher’s obsession with form: “Inarticulate / Blob of ink / Nose and tail / Out of scale…” while Bruce reflected,
“Yet for all the power that they express in their shape and their tough sandpaper skin, there is something frail about the elephant. Joseph Conrad attempted to expose the enormous absurdity and horror of the African ivory trade of the late Nineteenth century in his novel Heart of Darkness, and in doing so revealed something horrifying and enormous at the core of the European imagination – that atrocities could be committed for the sake of piano keys.”
After Alphabestiary, I embarked on a round-the-world lecture tour, departing from Ottawa via the Atlantic Ocean and returning via the Pacific, visiting sixteen cities, including five in India. In Sydney, I recited the “Elephant” poem at an animal rights event, where the poem was also displayed calligraphically. Before that, during a brief one-night stop in Aligarh, India, my niece Anabia, a young artist, crafted a paper elephant for me. Her elephant travelled with me around the globe, serving as a bookmark and ending up in my Ottawa home, perched precariously on a reading lamp. The delicate elephant was as resilient as the elephant in the poem that I remembered, along with the memories of that evening with Arthur Erickson.
Anabia’s origami elephant is found both in the nanoscale world of graphene and the macroscale of architecture. If memory can be stored biochemically in DNA or electromagnetically on a chip, it might also be encrypted using origami patterns, as recent research indicates.
Perhaps within the folds of their wrinkled brains, elephants, oral poets, and architects tap into origami architecture; their angels of memory residing in the angles of folds.
Note:
“DNA origami” has enabled Will Hughes at UBC Okanagan to develop dNAM: digital nucleic acid memory that consumes 100 million times less energy than current storage methods, strained by the energy demands of AI.
Glimpses of the Arthur Erickson Event:
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