as if we were all immortal

There is a room in Paris filled with the lady and unicorn tapestries.  I thought about it the other day when I came across an old journal entry.    I’m sorry that now I’ve misplaced those exact words, but maybe I can get the essence here.  

The famous unicorn tapestries are in The Musee de Cluny, a haven within the busy centre of Paris.  Last year when I visited Paris with our middle daughter, we looked in the gift store of this museum for two matching pillows, each with a unicorn done in needlepoint for her twin toddlers.

I took a few photos of the tapestries and am sharing them here.  The now lost journal entry was about hope and the human spirit and how the handmade object is an expression of resilliance.    

These tapestries are so old, yet there is something forever young about them.  

as if we were all immortal in some way

ourselves enormous

in the plumed fields of light are the shapely deeds of our flesh

what grandeur

                 (words by Al Purdy, Canadian poet)

Click this link to view Rebecca Mezoff's visit to the Cluny museum in 2019.  She describes and gives images of each of the tapestries.   

journal entries from the middle of March

Sunday:  

Idea:  to work from the back, to use more colour, to cut silk in narrow strips, to couch it to the back.

I write this idea down before bed.    

Monday: 

Or, to cut holes into the circles on the back and reveal the inner black batt, and then stitch around them with black thread that would show on the front side.

To use coloured silk and chance and also holes and to work from the back with out knowing how the front will be affected.

Tuesday;

We made a trip to Lively for an 11:30 appointment for new computer glasses for me. 

I let the lady there pick them out.

The metaphysics of the ordinary.  The pared down aesthetic. Nothing strident.  Well made.  

Intensely worked surface. Not hard work, but careful work. Do not know how it will turn out.

Trust that it is going to work.

My work is about comfort and about the inner world and about the cosmic mystery.

It is not a call to action.  It is a call to reflection.

sun and moon of mine, you've come.

my sight, my hearing, you've come

ecstasy, you've come

eyes filled with sun, harvest of all my longing,

you've come.

desert bandit, penance breaker, silver moon beloved

you've come

Rumi

Wednesday: 

Went to book club today.   It was well attended.  Seven people.  We all liked the book.   Girl With a Pearl Earring.  Afterwards, I went to my studio in town.

Thursday: 

Poetry is an element in all my work.  Poems not to be read, but to be seen and touched without the need to understand them.  

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and historical (the human world of violence and difference) in order to reach something transcendent.  (Ben Lerner )

Friday:  

Poetry comes from wanting to recognize a world where everything is connected.  Poems give a sense of prayer.  (Cecilia Vicuna)

Saturday:

We went to Sudbury yesterday.  It was a busy day.  A medical appointment for Ned.  A visit to see the gallery I'll be exhibiting in this summer.  

In my new quilt, I am couching long strips of silk around large unstitched circles.  I am loving the simplicity and the feeling that working this way gives me.  It's really slow.    I am enjoying my time spent with this piece.

I feel as if I'm painting or drawing - allowing my hands to do the thinking, not my mind.

Textiles are records of the every-day.  Textiles are records of endurance.  Textiles record the care and attention given to simple things that surround us. (Dorothy Caldwell)

Some souls have blue stars.  

Some souls have echoes of a burnt voice.

Crumbs of kisses.

Sobs from trees.

Tranquil whiteness.

Flocks of Songs.  

(selected words from several of Lorca's poems that he wrote in 1920)  

Poem

Day and night come hand in hand like a boy and a girl pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain, then they fly away.  

But you and I don't do such things.

We climb the same mountain; 

I say a prayer for the wind to lift us but it does no good; you hide your head so as not to see the end..

Downard and downward and downward and downward is where the wind is taking us.

I try to comfort you but words are not the answer; I sing to you as mother sang to me.

Your eyes are closed. 

We pass the boy and girl we saw at the beginning; now they are standing on a wooden bridge;

I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us, but no, the wind is in our ears, that is what we hear....

And then we are simply falling....

And the world goes by, all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you.

Poem by Louise Gluck

while everything else continues, unexplained and unexplainable

What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me?

I can't turn in any direction but its there. 

I don't mean the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's

silk song,  but the far off fires,

for example,  or the stars, heaven's slowly turning theater of light,

or the wind playful with its breath;

or time that's always rushing forward,or standing still 

in the same - what shall I say - moment.

What I know I could put into a pack as if it were bread and cheese,

and carry it on one shoulder, important and honourable, but so small!

While everything else continues, unexplained and unexplainable.

How wonderful it is to follow a thought quietly to its logical end.

I have done this a few times.

But mostly, I just stand in the dark field in the middle of the world, breathing in and out.

Life so far doesn't have any other name but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.

I simply go on drifting,

In the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

What is there beyond knowing, by Mary Oliver 

from New and Selected Poems volume two published 2005

These images are from the road trip through northern and mid Western Wales that Ned and I did the second week of August.  

All of them were taken from the passenger seat of a moving vehicle by me.  

We enjoyed this trip together very much.

The feeling of being with him in the middle of this fairy world

will stay with me for a long time and I am grateful.

Poet in Love

He seems to me equal to gods that man who opposite you

sits and listens close to your sweet speaking 

and lovely laughing -- oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking

is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking 

grips me all, greener than grass

I am dead -- or almost

I seem to me.

Fragment 31, Sappho

I received this white whole cloth quilt that was beginning to rot away from passage of time.  The back was the worst with big holes and disappeared batting so first I covered the back all over with new batting, some of which was not batting at all but a felting material (pre-felt) and then I added a layer of silk and rayon squares that had been dyed and then marked in the centres, all odd sizes, with large circles.  And then after that, on the other side, I added easter egg shapes of silk velvet and then I quilted the piece, echoing and renewing the earlier maker’s thick blue thread only I used a pinkish avocado thread instead. 

We used it on our bed during that velvet egg patching time and the colours were so very bright because they were from the pandemic dye experiments my artist daughter mixed up and the colours – well the colours were like spring and gave a renewal feeling of softness to that side.  When I quilted it, echoing the interesting and beautiful whole cloth pattern from the original, I went through the velvet and the original quilt and then it was done.  I washed and dried the thing in the machines – subjecting it to life and a kind of drowning death and then rebirth and oh wow, the pre-felted parts reacted and shrank and turned it into something older, or perhaps I mean more human.  The amazing texture in the now quite misshapen quilt, is no longer usable as a bed quilt but too interesting to not look at and touch. 

I look at it and think I want to wrap myself in this weird courage – this cloak of resilience and mistakes and time past and isolation-colour experiments. An object originally made by a woman I do not know but I admire nevertheless, a cloak from the pandemic when we didn’t know what we were doing or what would come next, when I was so afraid, but poured my fear and desire to protect my family into this cloth of many colours.   A softer than soft quilt.  An emotional cover up.  A close listener to my sweet speaking and lovely laughter and my breath.

I think of my quilts as poems, and for me, this one is like Sappho’s fragment 31, her love poem that describes how she falls apart when she looks at the beloved.  How she is greener than grass and also feels dead.  Her tongue breaks and fire races under her skin and in her eyes no sight and in her ears drumming and cold sweat holds her and shaking grips her. "Greener than green I am and dead, or almost I seem to me."

And how this quilt fell apart, dead or almost – but now it is greener than grass on the inside.  Dull on the outside, bright in the inside.  Your sweet speaking.  Your lovely laughing.  

I am not the original maker of this quilt, but I followed her lead and quilted along her beautiful lovely laughing lines, I listened to and then enhanced her sweet speaking.  I made something that is greener than green but also wrecked.  Something to wrap around a poet.  Something to represent a poet.  A poet in love.  A poet’s bittersweet dream cloak.

Fragment 31 is perhaps Sappho's most famous poem.  In this post it is translated from the original Greek by Anne Carson.  Fragment 31 was a key reference in Carson's long essay about the creative space of yearning, of not knowing but wanting to know and being in love with that erotic wooing or seeking, that human lovers and artists and thinkers are familiar with.  Eros the Bittersweet, was selected by the modern library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

the world

I couldn't tell one song from another

which bird said what or to whom or for what reason. 

The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words. 

I couldn't decide which door to open

they looked the same.

or what would happen when I did reach out

and turn a knob

I thought I was safe, standing there

but my death remembered its date.

Only so many summer nights still stood before me,

full moon, waning moon,

October mornings: what to make of them?  Which door?

I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was,

or which were still burning or not - 

their light moving through space like a long, late train - 

And I've lived  on this earth so long.  70 winters.

70 springs and summers, 

and all this time stars in the sky - in day light

when I couldn't see them

and at night when, most nights, I didn't look.

The text in this post is The World, a poem by Marie Howe (slightly edited : 70 instead of 50)

The images are of my stitching these past few weeks.