The poet William Carlos Williams said, “No idea but in things.” He then gave us the red wheelbarrow upon which so much depends. What was he telling us? This is one of those enigmatic statements that creates mystery around the idea of craft. What does the red wheelbarrow mean?!
I inherited three of my mother’s hooked rugs. To say she made them doesn’t do justice to the labor and artistry she employed. She cut lengths of cream wool fabric then dipped them into boiling pots on the stove one after another for varied amounts of time. The result was a multi-dimensional, dappled array of hues and tints of one color. These pieces were cut into strips with a device she clamped to the edge of the kitchen table. With the strips sorted by color, she hooked them into a canvas, creating flowers and leaves that fooled the eye with lush veracity. The three rugs I brought home after she died graced my wooden floors for a few years until a vicious infestation of moths decimated the fibers. I did my best to rescue what remained, freezing, thawing, refreezing to kill the moths. I set the protected rugs on my back patio through two deep winters. I don’t have the heart to look at what is left.
The moths were a rage that swept through my mother’s artwork, a shocking violence that ate at my confidence to be a responsible caretaker, a familiar turmoil about shame and a presence that insisted I was guilty beyond what I could control. These emotions are also part of my mother’s legacy. Until I found one piece of untouched dyed wool that had never been sliced into strips. It remains the unformed intention and energy of my mother’s artistic genius. It holds my mother’s electric and inspired charge that I wanted to understand as a child and now feel when I write. This piece of fabric holds the conduit between our shared creativity. It expresses the unspoken conversations in which her emotions informed mine and both restricted my patterns and set my wild imagination free. In a season of remembering and honoring, William Carlos William’s words about ideas and things speak to an object’s ability to represent inchoate, undissected meaning. The object embodies metaphor’s direct arc to a flash of understanding. One rectangle of infused and saturated color is an idea beyond measure.
Upcoming Events
Malibu Writing Retreat! The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway in February. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/
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