Crushing the butterfly

I had one of those bookstore moments last week where a book on the very bottom of the new releases shelf caught my eye. I picked it up, and it went home with me. (I feel good it was an independent bookstore. Just saying.) The book was

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett. It turned out to be well worth my time and money.

I want to share something in my own experience I heard Ann say in the book. It is about art and how it becomes real in our heads and then when we try to put it into a tangible form, it loses its glitter. I know because this happens with every single tapestry I weave.

I design largely in my head.

For a long time.

Little bits of this and that come together over time and an image forms. I can see it in all its beautiful form. I can almost feel the yarn and my muscles know what weaving it would feel like. Then I finally do the hard work of putting that beautiful idea into a cartoon and choosing the colors and yarn for it. And then I start to weave. And that is when it happens. Ann Patchett, who is a writer, puts it this way.

For me it's like this: I make up a novel in my head.... This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don't take notes or make outlines; I'm figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do. When I can't think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It's not that I want to kill it, but it's the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing--all the color, the light and movement--is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That's my book.

I know that sounds kind of stark, but it really is kind of like that. I have a beautiful image in my head and it is perfect. And I know it is going to be the best tapestry ever. The design has evolved over months and I have tweaked it endlessly until it is just perfect. But in the translation to a real, tangible piece of art, it becomes something that does not bear a great resemblance to the thing that I saw in my head.

Ann goes on to talk about how "art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft" and then to talk about forgiveness.

Somewhere in all my years of practice, I don't know where exactly, I arrived at the art. I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book [...] that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

Forgiveness for ourselves. Practice. Continue.

Reference: Patchett, A. (2013).

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. p. 24-25, 29-30.

Skunk saga reaches a conclusion... we hope!

Skunks have been a constant in my life the last three months. I want to say right up front that NO skunks were harmed in the making of this debacle. There were no babies or adults or corpses under the house when I finally crawled under there with my respirator on. None at all.

The story continued with another horrific spraying and a landlord who, after three months, finally showed up with a little guy named Buddy. I think Buddy is his real name. The landlord needed the littlest guy because the hole under the house was (before recent enlargement) only about 20 inches wide, recessed in a flower bed, and 18 inches high. The space under the house which I can personally attest is filled with black widow spiders and other crawling critters, is not much larger. Buddy was drafted to crawl under the house and look for skunks.  He saw none. He even stated, "it smells worse in the house than it does under here!" After crawling under there myself, I have to argue with that one, but Buddy has spent his formative years working as a painter, and the toxic fumes may well have addled his smeller. And likely also his brain as he and the landlord decided that dumping multiple boxes of naphthalene mothballs under the house was a good idea. After calling poison control, I had to convince him that they weren't a good idea and Buddy had to crawl back under the house to retrieve them.

The smell continued and I started looking for a new rental. Then my sister and brother-in-law had series of brilliant ideas.  Call the skunk expert. Vent the underside of the house. We bought a fan and the skunk expert (there is a guy who has trapped over 800 skunks and continues to play with the little stripey kitties--god bless him in every way) concurred that this was the best way to rid the house of smell.  I had the landlord cancel the also-toxic ozone treatment he was planning and last evening my most excellent brother-in-law installed this fan in the previously ugly hole at the side of the house.

I can't tell you how much better it smells in here. I can't smell naphthalene and I can't smell skunk. It is a revelation.

Prior skunk stories can be read HERE (The skunk in the night), HERE (Why Skunks are not smarter than I am), and HERE (The Cask of Amontillado).

The Cask of Amontillado

I grew up with a father who loves the likes of Robert Service, Garrison Keillor, and Edgar Allan Poe. While other kids were watching Sesame Street and the Electric Company, I did not have the pleasure of a television to rot my brain away, but instead listened to my father making up stories (he is especially good at ghost stories), quoting The Cremation of Sam McGee (by Robert Service: Alaska has a special mystery to the Mezoffs), or reading the likes of The Pit and the Pendulum or The Telltale Heart (Poe of course).

So you can get some of the flavor of my upbringing, here is part of Robert Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see,
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee. 

I can't remember the multitude of Bible verses I was required to memorize in the conservative Christian elementary school I attended, but I could recite this verse in my sleep. Good stuff. Thanks Dad.

One particular sequence of events in the last month reminds me of the Poe tale, The Cask of Amontillado.

If you don't remember the tale from when your father read it to you, it is a typically gruesome tale of retribution, wine, and catacombs:

No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick - on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my labor. I forced the last stone into its position ; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. 

This particular story comes to mind due to some recent work I did in the backyard involving a certain skunk hole:

This is the hole that has plagued my life of late--the most popular entrance to the space under the house where the skunks seem to want to set up permanent residence.  This hole needed to be plugged... which I proposed to do, though I had never worked with it before, with the use of this material which I found in my landlord's junky and luckily for me, unlockable shed:

...with this material I planned to make it impossible for the skunks to access the space under my house and to wake me up with their cloying, neurology-impairing stench. And the gradual cementing of the access hole is what brought to mind The Cask of Amontillado in which Fortunato meets an unfortunate end behind a brick wall.

Yes, I learned to mix concrete... and built the base of an impenetrable skunk barrier (skunks turn out to be right good little diggers when given the impetus--see the LAST skunk post if you dare HERE).

And then I spread some flour (gluten free!) over the concrete and I waited. I got up at night and I checked that flour. I put down more flour to make sure I wasn't missing tracks.

And nothing happened. For nights and nights, which was of course making me cranky as I hate being woken up in the middle of the night and that skunk just wasn't cooperating.  Then one night, I saw this:

There were tracks heading out of the hole.  And from there I sprang into action.

I closed up the hole with rocks.  Very heavy rocks.  Rocks weighing more than skunks... even if they were working as a team and had their own block and tackle. They were not moving these rocks. And I added wire mesh through which a skunk of average size could not fit.

And then I concreted the rocks in place and covered them with gravel which skunks clearly don't like to dig through.  And I thought that I had won.

But a few weeks later, I found that I had not. In the middle of the night I woke to a noxious smell and a sinking feeling in my heart. The skunk was back. Unbelievably, the skunk was back. I couldn't find the entrance and I have been forced to believe that I walled a skunk under there that has been subsisting on mice (yes, we have those too) and perhaps water from the washer which drains into the yard and more mice... and that perhaps that skunk had died under there and I was in for a long unpleasant smelling experience. The holes are all plugged, but the smell continues. Actually, it sounds kind of like the ending of an Edgar Allan Poe tale after all. Poor Fortunato.  

In pace requiescat !

Why skunks are not smarter than I am...

I am only supposing that skunks don't have the cognitive capacity of your average human due to the number I pass dead on the road every day. Sadly, I am not able to get close enough to one to complete a mini mental to test this theory.

Unfortunately, my particular skunk made a reappearance last night. I spent the day making pilgrimage to my storage locker. I promised Emily I would keep my phone in my pocket in case something heavy fell on top of me, but all that happened was that some guy called me twice from a "private" number and said, "Hey (deep silence)". Twice. I hope it was a wrong number.  Anyway, I did manage to find my dye sample book which was the chief reason for driving to Taos today as well as a list of other items plucked from various boxes including the reed I need to warp the LeClerc.

Cassy happy I left room for her in the car between the loom bench, boxes of yarn, and the rolls of cartoon paper and mylar

As I was relaxing last evening with a great new book about tapestry (Tapestry Weaving: Design and Technique by Joanne Soroka--and yes, my copy came from the Brits as it isn't published in the US yet and sometimes you just can't wait especially when it is free shipping from the UK), I heard some suspicious scrabbling at the wall behind the couch--the "back door" hole so to speak. And when my skunk-loving dog Cassy wanted to go out, she was way too happy about the back yard. Her insistent sniffing in the area of the "front door" hole-turned-big-pile-of-rocks (see this post) made my heart sink. I retrieved a flashlight and confirmed a new hole and very recent skunk activity judging by the excitement of one elderly labrador. Whoever said that skunks are lazy and don't like to dig too far hasn't met my high-achieving skunk. She just started digging at the edge of the rocks and busted her way in.

The "back door" hole attempt which apparently was quickly given up on as the skunk moved on to the "front door" hole.

That rock she moved is bigger than a grapefruit and probably weighs half of what the skunk does.

I wonder whether heavy construction, a wheelbarrow of cement, or a meet-and-greet should be my next approach. I do feel that I need to be prepared for the inevitable skunk-meets-dog encounter. This will involve a trip to town to get large quantities of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap. When these three things are mixed, the glop goes a long way to neutralize the noxious odor. But THIS time I am going to be prepared with a garden hose, elbow-level rubber gloves, and preferably a hazmat suit. I wonder if I can find one of those at my local feed store.