18.05.00 : a stitch in time

Thursday 18th May

"Crazy quilts, unlike their geometrical counterparts, were constructed without pattern or plan. The patches that made them up might be any shape, color or material: a new dimity bought for the color, an old serge saved for a memory, scraps of old dresses or neckties or coats, embroidered names, dates, maps and reminiscences, feed bags and handkerchiefs, ribbons and silk coffin linings." (Shelley Jackson)

My mother making quilts with no discernible pattern . . . my poet composing texts from written by others in bygone days . . . my brother, the acountant, working out someone else's taxes from so many scraps of paper . . .
Shelley Jackson constructing her hypertext, Patchwork Girl, from excerpts taken from countless footnoted sources . . .
Myself - stung by the (now ex-)wasp who found me instead of chocolate crumbs - scrabbling together quotations, in search of a narrative . .

"Better, constant crease & flux, a radical discontinuity as a lack, jeopardizes before & after, stop & start, a dynamic in fragments, suggesting an unmappable space, no coordinates, troubling us to locate ourselves in formal terms." (Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein).
To find a new place in my own narrative, I prefer to avoid linearity (sure I don't know the destination) - course, don't tell that to my students - for their prescribed essays, there's got to be a beginning-middle-end, no deviation - when they use an elipsis, it's going somewhere, three dots in search of the next part of the sentence. Me, I prefer, sometimes, to dive into one of the gaps . . .

My mother, when heavily pregnant, would begin making these enormous quilts out of differently coloured fabrics - a designer's nightmare, no pattern. I have 5 brothers (four of them acountants - my taxes are, consequently, a right mess) - so that's a lot of quilts. I'm the youngest and never got to witness any of this. But I can imagine the moods-thoughts-yearnings that went into each and every patch - her creative gestures (making life AND making art).

"She is writing blank. And writing wily. For annotators do not take the process of textual making for granted; they intervene in the processes of signification, canonization, attention-making. They point. They undermine. They bear shards of almost irrelevant information. Clues." (Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

One person that "writes blank" is the poet that I'm studying - while her place is certainly the page and not the quilt, her work never keeps to recognised boundaries. Each one of her phrases has been sampled from other narratives, each one a palimpsest. Part of her project is to stray well beyond the page without the reader knowing it. She is reconstructing out of everyday experience (just someone else's experience).

"Palimpsest, scratchings, incisions of memory and event, little traces and fleetings which may recede, may suddenly rear up as if the darkest letter. Palimpsest indicates the desire to manifest, by some verbal or textual gesture, the sense of presence, simultaneity, multiple pressures of one moment, yet at the same time the disjunct, the absolutely parallel and different, the obverse sensations of consciousness in reality" (Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

Actually, a bit like Brigid's map, with its countless quotations, textual excerpts, pictures, diagrams - the text map certainly carries traces of past narratives, but if we follow it (starting from where?) we suddenly begin to slip in between the dotted lines, the stitches joining the patches together. This is what happens every time I unravel it. Perhaps configuring a new space . . .

Shane