Truth and Beauty

     As a young girl, I was introduced to the art of Faith Ringgold, whose story quilts combine paint, fabric, and narrative. Her art springs from a form commonly thought of as craft--I’ve had the chance twice now to look at examples of those types of quilts in Lancaster, PA. Their sort have always been women’s work, and work, that, while not being explicitly narrative, is meant to hold the story of the family that created it, meant to be passed on and on--a textile of human life. Ringgold makes literal what is figurative, an interesting device in the artistic world. She creates a textual textile, clothing, draping, painting, stitching, writing her stories. I thought of her work when I saw Bright Star, saw Fanny Brawne sew stitches of care, thought, love, sorrow; thought about women, how there is something inherently feminine about fabric and how the fabric of themselves and their lives is written/woven by ourselves and by others. We are not art but we are artists--we paint ourselves and others in certain lights, life struggling toward being something better--not erasing imperfections, but crafting them, creating a narrative body at once physical and physiological.
     Five weeks without female companionship, save a night: a pleasure greatly missed; women rarely disappoint you, seldom let you down. My second night back in Brooklyn was spent watching a British film from 1954 (Netflix hadn’t been informed that I’d left that era behind), Please Turn Over. Please turn over, he might say, or might be written, or demand a closer inspection. Book to bed and page to sheet--text and textile. The film centers around Josephine Halliday (thanks for following me, Dial M), a seventeen year old who writes a salacious novel, Naked Revolt, that imagines her family in a torrid light. A couple of gems, just for the hell of it:

     “I’d like to kiss each one of your ribs.”
     “I say that’s naughty. All right. Later.”

And:

     “Lovers are under greater obligation to be frank with each other than husband and wife.”

     “My goodness, that’s a highly sagacious aphorism. What’s its current application?”

     The movie plays with our ideas of ourselves, and how easily they can be rewritten--there’s always a flip side. I bound a book about beds once, made the covers the mattress, the pages sheets, the spine, four posters. There is a way in which women’s stories are couched--or should I say bedded--in a web of habiliment, weaving a mystic poetry of paper fibers and fine silk. And how illusive this is; life and story--creation--provide hope and in the same instance evoke a certain hopelessness for their permanence that can so speedily and quietly be lost. A partnership of sacrifice--we inhabit our stories by creating them--shape our stories to represent ourselves, just as our garments can retain our shapes after we have shed them.

     At The Verge this Friday the 13th, I watched Claire, creator, refute her role as procreator, eschewing men and women alike. The three men in her life, neatly named Tom, Dick, and Harry, are a sum of all their parts--their autonomous selves unable to fulfill Claire. “You are too much, you are not enough,” she says to the one of them who might have seen her most clearly. It is in this inability to satiate that Claire distances herself from gender and turns toward science to create life without a partner. She is trying to write her story herself, to be free from what men, and the world, and her children want to create for her or at least, with her. She turns to the soil, to the earth, where even in death there is life, and grows something outside of herself and for herself alone--Breath of Life she calls this plant, its scent, Reminiscence. And it is beautiful. And that she has made something is beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that the one other human in her world who might not have tried to take ownership of her and the story of her life that she was trying to write, wants it. Suddenly wants her. And she realizes that she cannot succeed--she kills her plant, kills her would-be mate, but her daughter lives. Nature fails, but what is natural succeeds--and nature and her daughter keep trying. And so do I. Mom, and Stella, and Helen. Amanda, Meredith, Sarah, Cynthia, Sharon, Helen, Jane, Mary and Alice, Gita, Virginie, Marcella . . .