Adjectives

Good god I feel seen when reading Anne Carson’s writing on adjectives in the introduction to Autobiography of Red. It just becomes immediately clear that adjectives were the entirety of my interest in poetry, and that's why I failed at it. And why I leapt to abstract painting, which I see now is also all adjectives. Nothing surprises like adjectives, layered and unneeding the structure of a sentence to deliver their power, just as abstraction unneeds a figure. Unattached to rhythm. Unattached to form. A story unto itself, tethering associations onto its one. “The latches of being.” (AC)

The story is the association. The world is created in the joining. The seasonings are the adjectives of the soup. The nouns are unstable. The adjectives alter their makeup. “Unattaching their epithet” (AC). The adjectives redefine the name.

I have never been able to tell a story. I’m just not that interested in hitting the defined marks required, though, like everyone, I ride along happily when being told a story. But I am always surprised by their unfolding—that gun! Again! Unexpected every time.

And I can’t figure rhythm either. Really. Every word can be pronounced so many ways—who says which syllable has the emphasis? Who says? The ground is not stable.

Adjectives are free to function how they please. The smallest story. Dismissing pronunciation. And still walloping. If I say, “She could not hear anything through her need,” you have the story already. Everything else is elaboration.

Who makes the item and where

It came to me in a dream. Like, it literally did. I dreamed the phrase "abstract impressionist embroidery" and I saw what the art looked like. I can still see it. I woke up excited--I wanted to see what it looked like in the real world. But google returned no results on the search term--abstract impressionist embroidery didn't actually exist. And that meant I had invented it.

It was about a year after I had quit writing for good and I was suffering through what I can only call withdrawal. Quitting was the right decision for me but it was painful, and it required a sort of re-ordering of my identity, my time, and my emotional state. Plus it was about a year into the pandemic, so nothing felt particularly solid.

I painted in my 20s and I learned embroidery in junior high. It took me a full day to realize that the canvas you paint on was fabric, which is also what you stitch on. A full goddamn day.

My sister-in-law had played with embroidery a bit and still had some thread and needles. And there was some acrylic paint in the house from various projects. I bought a small canvas. And I did some experimenting, which resulted in this:

It didn't look a lot like what I saw in my dream but I was kind of delighted with it, and with the possibilities of it. I felt like I had invented something new and thrilling, and that could fill the vacancy in my where writing had once been, and also enter the world truly representing my own contradictions: small, precise and intense, but also chaotic and undisciplined.

I made a ton of paintings over the next several years, and rented a studio for a year to see what would happen if I had a dedicated space. I even sold a couple of paintings during open studios, to my utter shock. But the other painters in that studio all sort of zoned out when I mentioned embroidery. I watched myself morph from painter to granny in their eyes. It made me defensive and self-righteous, and then tired.

I don't paint a ton right now; I'm not sure if I exhausted my interest or just my ability to hold my neck in the bend required for stitching. But every once in a while I come across something that piques my interest, like Caroline Harrius who embroiders pottery (!) or an article about embroidery as subversive protest. And I get pulled back toward it. We'll see.

Holidays

On Thanksgiving 1988, my Nana died. She was the only person in my family who felt like family. She died on thanksgiving, the actual day. Her husband, my grandfather, died on Christmas of that same year. On Thanksgiving of 1994, a friend, whose wedding I officiated, died of brain cancer. He was 29. My mother died a week after thanksgiving in 2017.

Last year, I got COVID at a Christmas party a week before we were scheduled to move into a new apartment, and 2 weeks before a trip to Mexico, which we had to cancel and eat the entire cost.

Thanksgiving this year I had hip bursitis so painful I couldn't walk. It just got better, after a cortisone shot. Last week, I started feeling a little toothache, ironically a couple days after I scheduled a first checkup with a new dentist. I ignored it, thinking it could wait until the Jan 3 appointment. It couldn't. Tomorrow, Dec 23, I'm scheduled for an emergency root canal.

So let me say with all the sincerity in my heart: Fuck the holidays. Fucking fuckity fuck them all the way to the moon.

Update: I forgot one! Thanksgiving 2019, I was super excited to run a 5k Turkey Trot around Lake Merritt with my sister-in-law and niece and nephew. Like very, very excited. But I got sick a few days before Thanksgiving, and after quite a lot of examination, it turned out that I had tonsillitis, and I got it from the very affectionate Reina, the elderly chihuahua I was living with at the time. So not only did I not get to run the race, I had to explain that it was because I got tonsillitis from a dog. Perfect.