It’s been good to have a break from blogging. I’ve missed the opportunity to communicate with you, and the discipline&framework of purposeful writing, which helps cut temporary paths through snarls of work&words and fuzzy ideas, but I felt mentally exhausted and needed to pause.
First I need to report a loss which I hardly dared acknowledge, even to myself. Look at the work I’m posting: I pulled those threads through the photograph several months ago – and while I longed to do more along these lines (sew, stitch, embroider, as I did when I started my father/daughter/history-project) I found hands and eyes were not cooperating. I can’t place a needle’s point where I mean to, am prone to pouring coffee next to the cup, drop stuff all the time (no hats!), and my handwriting has disintegrated. I’d thought I could crochet when half asleep, yet suddenly it too became a toil and my brain got stuck in obsessive loops: What did this mean, for me, my life? Was it time to finally chuck the arts in, stop trying so hard? What would that mean for me, my life? And so on. Writing sustained me for a while – I used it to keep my mounting panic in check.
I’m a bit easier now. It seems the meds I’m phasing out not only didn’t bring me closer to the vertical but may have had adverse, hopefully transitory effects on the already depleted strength of limbs and clarity of vision, amongst other things. This morning another bowl bit the dust on the kitchen floor, but I’m guiding hands and fingers towards capacity&competence through crochet-stitches executed at a cranky snail’s pace. Pens and needles will be precision-pointed in time. No matter how much I love writing, I also need to be making work.
For the above piece I took quick snaps (on the floor, in case my camera submits to gravity), tilting the threaded photograph at different angles, and these two interest, even please me. The points where the wool passes through the image follow the outline of my father’s head&shoulders from a Prisoner of War-card I’ve talked about before (see posts Jan-March 2014).
Let me describe the original childhood-photograph of which you only get a partial view: My brother and I sit in front of an indefinable background and behind a table covered with a fluffy blanket, which makes me think the photo was taken in one of those Pixi(e)-booths which could be found in 60’s department stores, cheapish versions of a professional studio set-up. We are wearing Sunday best. I, the older one, sit sideward, elbow on table, with my head leaning on my hand (rather an adult pose). My brother sits frontally, his beaming face turned to the right.
Are these true smiles or instructed ones, as the poses are? I don a secretive little one, quite aware of the circumstances, while my brother’s is just a little strained, maybe because we had to sit still for rather long. I wonder why we smiled to the right and not straight into the camera? Where my mom or dad standing there or did the photographer think this semi-turn made for a livelier photograph? To be honest, I fantasise that we’re looking at my dad, out with us (mom, brother, I) on a day off, which would have made this a special occasion.
You may remember how the gaze in said photograph of my father, taken in the US eighteen, nineteen years earlier, taxed me (see post 13 March 14). Of course when I think of sides and directions I now immediately ‘see’ the Hitler salute; remember the masses of children standing with right arms raised in Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will, faces aflame with ordained love. The ‘Führer’ consciously positioned himself as a father-figure. Through the Hitler Youth the Nazis aimed to replace parents as primary raisers&educators of children – oaths of allegiance&loyalty, with a focus on duty and sacrifice to the death, were sworn to Hitler by ten year-olds.
I’m not saying that all this can be discerned from my collage; it’s what I found when I engaged with what I’d made. Those gleaming threads fall (like hair swept across a forehead), conjuring and concealing, covering and laying bare, holding, wrapping, trapping, tieing together, and throwing shadow-lines across my heart.
