day 65: Clotho is awesome

Do you ever wonder why sewing is such a passion? Why it is so satisfying to create fine stitched work? Or to handle the smooth fabric and admire the tightly-woven, straight seams? If you suspect it’s connected to our desire for order, control, and symmetry, I agree. And I’d wager such longings explain the story of our mythic ancestress, Clotho, the Fate, who spins the thread of human life.

Clotho is one of our earliest fore-mothers, in a long line of women stitching. My history is probably like yours in some ways. I bet if you thought about your own family, you might find similar traditions of sewing, embroidery, quilting, or at least mending clothes (remember darning socks on a lightbulb?!)–arts and skills which are making a comeback at present, it seems… in this new Depression era.

My love of sewing is closely connected to my mother’s teachings, who learned it from her mother in Portland, OR, who likely learned it from her German-born mother. (That’s grandma as a tot, second from bottom right, and her mom sitting behind her with a baby on her lap.)

Some of my fondest teenage memories have to do with sewing. (OK, I know! We were sewing store geeks!) Since I lived in the Bryant neighborhood and my friend lived in Laurelhurst, it was easy. We’d ride our bikes down to Stitch in Time, down by the U Village (before the U Village was chic), and spend hours designing our own special looks (Betsey Johnson was our idol), buying the fabrics, and then riding uphill—steeply—to our houses at the top of hills, to admire our stashes and make stuff. Both of us had learned it from our mothers with the help of Home Ed class at school. (Home Ed actually has a fascinating history and provides many key skills. I wish they’d put such “vocational” topics back into circulation in HS.)

I am so attached to this heritage that I kept using grandma’s wrought-iron sewing machine (a 1928 White Rotary, above) until, after multiple attempts to repair it and after getting machine oil all over my hands one too many times, I sadly gave it up. (It’s still in the garage, of course.) My new machine, an industrial model Juki, was recommended by my sister-in-law, a fellow aficionado of textiles, who actually runs a flourishing interior design business in Seattle.

This is clearly a matriarchy of knowledge and skill, a source of power. Just look at our ancestor, Clotho, and her sisters!

Clotho is a mythological figure. In ancient Greek mythology, she is the one of the Three Fates or Moirai. Her role is a spinner; as she spins thread, she brings people to life. In this tapestry, called The Triumph of Death, or The 3 Fates, you can see how the three Fates work together. Her sister Fates, Lachesis and Atropos, draw out the thread of life (Lachesis) and cut it (Atropos). Thread represented human life and the decisions of Clotho and her sisters–how and when to begin, prolong, and end life–thus represented the fate of all people in society.*

WOW! That is one powerful sisterhood

I love how my quilts are now speaking to the face masks: Here is yesterday’s mask production, followed by two quilts from pre-COVID-19 days:

See how the ginkgo tree green, and the blue cranes, from “Kimono Silk Quilt no. 2” (above, left) have now shown up in face masks?  Also visible are face masks made of the black and white chessboard fabric, and black polka dots, from “Alice in Wonderland” small quilt no.1 (above, right). My stash is literally walking out the door! (not to worry, there’s plenty more)

 

Who cares if it’s geeky? Stitch on, sisters and nieces, near and far!

 

With love to Andrea, Shellie, and Jessie

 

info and imagery from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotho and tapestry: Flemish, 1510-1520, Victorian and Albert Museum, London.

By This mediaUser:PriorymanOriginal workUnknown artist – Image by w:User:Prioryman, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53491807

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day eight: let us make things happen

“Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.”  –Richard Wright*

In our current bleak environment, let us make things happen.

Volition, William James tells us, the power to will ourselves to act toward some future purpose, is what makes humans unique among the animals. As he writes, “the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heart-strings as we say, “Yes, I will even have it so!”** We are arguably the only sentient creatures on earth who make plans that will not come to fruition until some unspecified time in the future, possibly beyond our life span. (This is a gift and a curse, possibly our greatest folly, as philosophers from the East and the West have rightly noted.)

Now, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, it is hard to know what do to. How and where should one will one’s will to act? As a skilled seamstress, should I rush down to the JoAnn’s store and pick up a mask-making kit for medical personnel?  Should I take my car, even if I thereby contribute to the traffic jams already happening, due to the abrupt West Seattle Bridge closure earlier this week? Or should I stay home as Governor Inslee has ordered? I am frozen.  So I stay home. And I look for a transfusion of hope from beloved books. That in itself is an act of will, and it reinforces the promise I made to you last week.

And that is how I landed on today’s quote by a great American writer (and Francophile), Richard Wright, pictured above, from his powerful and heartbreaking book, Black Boy. His words remind us that today’s struggle, for the millions of people who are healthy, remains primarily a mental battle. If we are lucky enough to have housing, food, and good health, yet we are unable to go out or work in the world, how can we continue to feel purpose?  We have to will it into being.

Some years ago, while I was writing a book on literature about the French Revolution, I wondered about the pre-conditions for artistic genius. Would France have seen the great novels of megalomania and disillusion written by Stendhal (b. 1783), Honoré de Balzac (b. 1799) or Victor Hugo (b. 1802) without the Revolution of 1789-93 and the memory of its trauma on their lives? Is there a cause-effect relationship between one’s generation–the time and place where you live, your country’s wars and prosperity– and one’s genius?  I was quite taken by the following quote by Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, about the conditions necessary for an artistic renaissance:

“Poetry requires something enormous, barbaric, and savage.  …  When shall we see the birth of poets?  It will be after a time of disaster and great misfortune, when the beleaguered people will draw a breath.  Then the imagination, shaken by those terrible spectacles, will depict things unknown to those who have not seen them.”***

Could the present crisis give birth to a renaissance in the 2020s?  Let it be so, and let it begin with us.

P.S. In case you think I’m shirking my civic responsibility by not going down to JoAnns’ in Southcenter to get a mask-sewing kit, please know I have signed up to sew masks (Phase 3) for Sew Loved, in South Bend, IN. (and you can too, by clicking here!)  People with pets in their homes are ineligible for making medically-approved masks for Sew Loved (Phase 1 & 2), alas.

* Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, 1^st ed. 1944, (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 72-73.

** William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, ed. Gordon Allport (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 326.

***Denis Diderot, « De la poésie dramatique », 1st ed. 1758 in Œuvres esthétiques, éd. Paul Vernière, Paris, Garnier, 1968, vol. 2, p. 2.  With thanks to Elena Russo for this translation, from her book Styles of Enlightenment, p. 200.