adrienne rich
she's got wisdom too:
...In speaking of lies, we come inevitably to the subject of truth. There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no "the truth,";"a truth"--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.
This is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler--for the liar--than is really is or ought to be.
In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even with our own lives.
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
...In speaking of lies, we come inevitably to the subject of truth. There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no "the truth,";"a truth"--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.
This is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler--for the liar--than is really is or ought to be.
In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even with our own lives.
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
posted by caitlin grace | 9:00 PM
5 Comments:
Excerpted from
CAPTURING THE UNICORN
by RICHARD PRESTON
The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-04-11:
In 1998, the Cloisters—the museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan—began a renovation of the room where the seven tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” hang. The Unicorn tapestries are considered by many to be the most beautiful tapestries in existence. They are also among the great works of art of any kind. In the tapestries, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by hunters and hounds, pursue a unicorn through forested landscapes. They find the animal, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, “The Unicorn in Captivity,” the unicorn is shown bloody but alive, chained to a tree surrounded by a circular fence, in a field of flowers. The tapestries are twelve feet tall and up to fourteen feet wide (except for one, which is in fragments). They were woven from threads of dyed wool and silk, some of them gilded or wrapped in silver, around 1500, probably in Brussels or Liège, for an unknown person or persons, and for an unknown reason—possibly to honor a wedding. A monogram made from the letters “A” and “E” is woven into the scenery in many places; no one knows what it stands for. The tapestries’ meaning is mysterious: the unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages, including Christianity, immortality, wisdom, lovers, marriage. For centuries, the tapestries were in the possession of the La Rochefoucauld family of France. In 1922, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought them for just over a million dollars, and in 1937 he gave them to the Cloisters. Their monetary value today is incalculable.
As the construction work got under way, the tapestries were rolled up and moved, in an unmarked vehicle and under conditions of high security, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the Cloisters. They ended up in a windowless room in the museum’s textile department for cleaning and repair. The room has white walls and a white tiled floor with a drain running along one side. It is exceedingly clean, and looks like an operating room. It is known as the wet lab, and is situated on a basement level below the museum’s central staircase.
In the wet lab, a team of textile conservators led by a woman named Kathrin Colburn unpacked the tapestries and spread them out face down on a large table, one by one. At some point, the backs of the tapestries had been covered with linen. The backings, which protect the tapestries and help to support them when they hang on a wall, were turning brown and brittle, and had to be replaced. Using tweezers and magnifying lenses, Colburn and her team delicately removed the threads that held each backing in place. As the conservators lifted the backing away, inch by inch, they felt a growing sense of awe. The backs were almost perfect mirror images of the fronts, but the colors were different. Compared with the fronts, they were unfaded: incredibly bright, rich, and deep, more subtle and natural-looking. The backs of the tapestries had, after all, been exposed to very little sunlight in five hundred years. Nobody alive at the Met, it seems, had seen them this way.
A tapestry is woven from lengths of colored thread called the weft, which are passed around long, straight, strong threads called the warp. The warp runs horizontally, and provides a foundation for the delicate weft, which runs vertically. Medieval tapestry weavers worked side by side, in teams, using their fingertips and small tools to draw the weft around the warp. When they switched from one color to the next, they cut off the ends of the weft threads or wove them into the surface of the tapestry. The Unicorn weavers had been compulsively neat. In less well-made tapestries, weavers left weft threads dangling in a shaggy sort of mess, but the backs of these were almost smooth. Kathrin Colburn recalls that as she and her associates stared into the backs of the Unicorn tapestries it “felt like a great exploration of the piece.” She said, “We simply got carried away, seeing how the materials were used—how beautifully they were dyed and prepared for weaving.” An expert medieval weaver might need an hour to complete one square inch of a tapestry, which meant that in a good week he might finish a patch maybe eight inches on a side. The weavers were generally young men, and each Unicorn tapestry likely had a team of between four and six working on it. They wove only by daylight, to insure that the colors were consistent and not distorted by candlelight. One tapestry would have taken a team at least a year to complete.
The curator in charge of medieval art at the Metropolitan and the Cloisters is a thoughtful man named Peter Barnet. When he heard about the discovery, he hurried down to the wet lab for a look. He got a shock. “The first of the tapestries—‘The Start of the Hunt’—was lying in a clear, shallow pool of water,” Barnet said. The lab is designed to function as a big tub, and had been filled about six inches deep with purified water to bathe the tapestry. “Intellectually, I knew the colors wouldn’t bleed, but the anxiety of seeing a Unicorn tapestry underwater is something I’ll never forget,” he said. When Barnet looked at the image through the water, he said, “the tapestry seemed to be liquefied.” Once the room had been drained, it smelled like a wet sweater.
tweezers!
wisdom, lovers, marriage! all made possible, of course (why are you the only one out there who understands this?) by tweezers!
i saw adrienne rich recently here in portland -- she was so amazing and small and wizened, as though her skill and craft and heart and all her magic had been condensed and compressed over the years into her sparkling, gem-like little self. i had her sign a book and she looked at me so long with her sweet, kind eyes, i cried all the way home, it was so touching. i love adrienne rich.
Hi reasonably prudent poet:
I'm going to see her read tonight in nyc, actually. I know what you mean about her eyes. My friend helped her out of a car once years ago and was teary afterward for hours.
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