Re-balancing seriously squif habits

I'm not officially back on this blog. Not at all. I am still on a self-granted Sabbatical, shielding me from feeling that I have to share or speak out in public about anything.

However, after inspecting the latest edition of  The Marginalian to sail into my inbox, there are a few thoughts that this outrageously named blogsite is whispering I tattoo upon it immediately, so here goes.

In the above newsletter, the conversation between Bill Moyers and Martha Nussbaum about human goodness leads her to tell him that being a good human being means caring, staying true to and, in fact, sticking up for, your values - to live life, as she says, "with a deep seriousness of commitment" and "to wrest from the world the good life" you desire. And this naturally sometimes leads, undeservedly, to tragedy in the good person's life.

She is firm that a detached person who no longer expects fulfilment or gratification from the world cannot be considered properly human, because of the decisive disconnect between themselves and others and the consequent immunity to tragedy, or profound hurt.

Now, during two years of pandemic and lockdown, I have witnessed a significant portion of my fellow humans forced to detach themselves socially and psychologically more than they have ever done before. This includes myself. It has led me to experience my living self, indeed, as not-quite-human; with the exception of my family and friends, as utterly irrelevant to humanity and the human world. As bewildering and unwelcome as this perception has been, it did bring with it simultaneously a certain sense of not caring - in the best sense of that word: the sense of being carefree.

Yet there's a totally illogical fundament to this. Globally, the pandemic and lockdown, the medical, economic, political and social stresses, have been hurtful, traumatic, tragic. Simultaneously, there have been unforeseen griefs in my own, as well as the personal lives of others I know. How can all this lead to more lightness?

Hmm. Tough one.

I am a person who has cared, i.e. carried, perhaps, too much for too long, and so, 'not caring', in my case, could effectively be a sensible re-balancing of a seriously squif set of habits; divesting myself from a lifetime's overload, as it were, and thus facilitating a redistribution of my dubious wealth (aka load of responsibilities).

Caring, or carrying, less (those words are actually synonymous for me) has been a shift that has caused me, paradoxically, to care enough - about being a good human being, I guess - to be here at this moment. 

So, that's the 'tattoo' my blog wanted, to start two thousand and twenty-two. A kind of decorative whirl of gentle hmms.

Now where was that Sabbatical? I'm still happily riding into both sunrises and sunsets upon it. Let's keep going, Sweetheart.

Photo by TS Sergey@ttsergey

 

Prior to milk and bread

Mariss Stevens' Containment series caught my eye on Instagram. The series is a set of quilted images created over the past weeks. Her latest blogpost, On Containment (22nd May 2020), describes the process from conception to finish, including a definition of 'containment' as holding (holding back) and 'restraint'.

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self", the poet Ilya Kaminsky recently (14th May 2020) quoted Stravinsky speaking about musical composition, on Twitter - "And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision."

In Mariss' series, vases contain and constrain flowers, which are pulled into captivity by the mouths of vessels, thence to fountain out their blossoms the more -

Containment #3

Containment #7

 Tree trunks operate similarly.

Containment #1

The constraints of format and resources, in this series, expands in the fifth work - not only to flip the orientation of of the work from portrait to landscape, but also beyond inward - house and garden - motifs, to reach quite literally for the moon.

Containment #5

Mariss judges the connection between it and the theme to be "nebulous", but I question that judgment. The series consists of eight works - the number which, flipped sideways, represents infinity in mathematics; and the one that in the arcane realm symbolises balance between heaven and earth. Five is understood to bring chaos and conflict, but also transformation and change.

Mariss' moon in this series is pregnant with the potency of the time-piece, which that heavenly body is, in relation to the earth: determining our calendar, the tides and feminine cycles. The exquisite fabricated image, contained upon the background in its frame and constrained by its position in the series overall, reflects an undertow of truth, which penetrates the boundaries of the lockdown in utter peace.

'Time as a task' during quarantine has recently been found by Parul Seghal - in an essay entitled In Search of Time Lost and Newly Found (19th May 2020) - to be a slippery and bewildering challenge; but these little textile works demonstrate the power of working with time, working within its natural limits. The crafter-artist flowers again and again inside her hours and her works are pollen grains, or little moons, from the hands of her soul.

All our days are numbered, that is to say: limited, but each day contains its own potential. I pondered the practicalities of this mystery in a pollen grain of my own, a blogpost from about a year ago, entitled Time as an organic fact (14th May, 2019).

Time can be felt as "a natural sequence of moments blossoming their opportunities", I wrote, and I still agree with me about this. Too fine a plan or regimen will scorch them; take no action and they will drown.

The hours we are given are our nourishment prior to milk and bread. Eat, drink, enjoy!

I thank Mariss Stevens for allowing me to use images of her works for this post. To see the full set, including the mesmerising process of how she created the moon, as well as the surprise coup of the eighth work, click The Containment series.

- Silke Heiss, 27th May 2020

Cache - a poem on mother love, from Unplanned Hour, 2012