I like the way the word serendipity skips off the tongue a sweet and merry band of syllables. Last week, searching for flowers in a break between two hospital appointments, M. and I happened on Persephone Books. You know I’ve got a thing for Greek myths, esp. its female figures, but my pleasure was heightened as Persephone had surfaced in a communication with Sonia Boué and Helen Le Broc on Barcelona in a Bag not long ago. Persephone Books re-publish (in their own words) ‘neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid-twentieth century (mostly women) writers’. Each tome is a beautiful object, with endpapers and bookmarks based on fabric-designs. I came home with treasures, which M. (in her own words) carried happily.
Fatigue drastically limits my ability to read and I worry about not knowing enough. I’m a great dipper-in but less good at finishing books, partly from a desire to explore multiple sources, partly because my chest fills with icy mists. When I write I wander about in my own head, and if I follow well-trodden paths, hope to stumble along the way, find new turns. But then I’m an artist, not a historian, and make my work from what I’ve heard, gleaned, glimpsed. Can I make constrained circumstances, my personal focus, the simplicity of my work, a strength? In effect my ear is pressed against a pocket on the uniform my father wears in the photographs I ponder, the pocket right above his heart.
You’ve seen before how I focus on small details so I can bear looking at the greater picture, as with the little girl raising her arm in a crooked Hitler-salute in Leni Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will, which fuelled a whole series of crochet-pieces and has something to do with the single untethered sleeve I’m working on now. A few days ago I watched a documentary about photo-journalist and war-photographer Don McCullin who over decades reported from conflict-zones all over the world. I’d already tried several times and always found the news film-footage overwhelming. The fact that someone can be declared an enemy at the drop of a hat so-to-speak; the naked terror in the faces of those (whose hands often held no arms) who knew they’d be executed within moments, soldiers/civilians/children even; the grief of mothers/wives/lovers/children; the extreme othering at work… While I’m trying to grapple with the knowledge that we have the capacity, even the will to kill each other, something Simone Weil wrote in a letter to a friend came to mind: “As for me, on the contrary, as I think I told you, I have the germ of all possible crimes or nearly all, within me. I became aware of this in the course of a journey, in circumstances which I have described to you. The crimes horrified me, but they did not surprise me. I felt the possibility of them within myself; it was actually because I felt this possibility in myself that they filled me with such horror…”* Does this sound like an excuse when coming from a Wehrmacht soldier’s daughter’s mouth?
Strangely the one thing I can bear to recall without trying to fight off the image (and from which all else hangs) is a photo of an American soldier whose face is frozen in shock. It doesn’t matter which war, where, when. McCullin (who throughout spoke of war as madness) explained that he had taken five separate images, which all came out exactly the same, as the soldier didn’t move, didn’t blink. This face, the empty/overfull eyes, contained all that could not be said, not be borne.
Crocheting a lace of red and black along the hems of a bandage made perfect sense while I was doing it, but now I see an object that haplessly, inadequately domesticates and aesthetizes grief, loss, pain, unhealed, maybe unhealable, wounds. Not having lived through … is this all I can do?
I have penned pages of possible titles, all filled with pathos, which I’ve tried to rid myself of, but maybe it’s just the (helpless) thing here, and for now I’m staying with: Streams from his hollow heart a hope
Really it’s a kind of daughter’s lament: I feel, I fail, his shadow heart. I fail to feel his shadow heart. I fail and fault his shadow heart. My shadow heart feels fails faults furrows, feels and fails, seals, hails, heaves, holds, and cannot heal his, mine, ours, nor share. Or share?
*Waiting on God. Letters and Essays.
