Posted by allisonm on March 28, 2001, at 18:54:06
I thought this first-person article In the Chronicle of Higher Education on a woman's experience of working through her depression was very good.
From the issue dated March 30, 2001
Quilting to Save My Life
By JANET CATHERINE BERLO
Beth, my research assistant, rockets through the front door
in a flurry of enthusiasm.
"I found some biographical information on that Lakota artist!
I looked through the census records for 1890 and found her
last name."
I try to comprehend what she is saying, but I feel as if I'm
struggling to arrive from a great distance. I've spent the
last seven hours immersed in patchwork of vermilion and burnt
umber. I find it hard to speak. Even more frightening, I find
it hard to comprehend the words that tumble out of Beth's
mouth.
"Then I searched the biographical directory of Native artists,
but that was a dead end. And then I went back to the records
of the Indians who went to the mission school ..."
I interrupt her. "Is it all written down in your notes?"
"Yes, but ..."
"Good," I manage to say firmly and, I hope, at least a little
gracefully. "Thanks for all your hard work. I'll read it
later. I'm in the middle of something else right now." I
hustle her out the door.
As soon as the door closes behind her, I begin to cry. Not big
sobs. Just soundless tears, seeping from beneath my closed
eyelids. I stalk into the living room and huddle miserably on
the couch.
"My academic life is over," I think to myself savagely. "I
can't even understand simple sentences anymore. She might as
well have been speaking Chinese. I just knew I had to get her
out of here." I knock the pile of photocopies and typed notes
off the coffee table and onto the floor, and kick at it
ineffectually.
Fleeing the mess of papers, I climb the oak staircase of my
100-year-old Victorian house in St. Louis, bypassing the
second floor, on up the carpeted stairs to the third floor, my
aerie, my safe haven. It used to be my study. But gradually,
over the past few months, the desk and writing table have
grown dusty and lifeless, while the other side of the room has
been transformed into a quilt studio.
Here my stacks of fabric comfort me. Sorted and piled
according to color, they await my touch to animate them, turn
them into the controlled chaos of what I call my "Serendipity
Quilts." Here the only language is color and pattern.
It is January 1993. I am in the sixth month of my quilting
depression. Nothing makes sense to me but the rhythmic buzz of
my sewing machine, the hiss of the steam iron, and the riotous
hues that surround me.
My husband leaves for work at 7:45 a.m. I don't answer the
phone or the doorbell. My job is all-day, intensive
color-and-pattern therapy. I am piecing for cover. I am
quilting to save my life.
The word "depression" evokes a picture of extreme lassitude:
unwashed hair, unmade bed, physical stasis. My depression
wasn't like that. It involved a total shutdown of my normal
daily life as a prolific historian of American Indian art and
the unfurling of a new part of me.
Sort of a Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Patchwork.
While I don't know anything about brain circuitry, the way
I've come to explain it to myself is that the verbal, linear
pathways in my brain shut down. The parts that were hungry for
color and texture took over. Picture the way kudzu takes over
roadside ditches in the South, or mint colonizes the herb
patch -- everything else overgrown, spindly, unreachable.
When I wasn't quilting, I wasn't alive. On most days, I felt
that I literally needed those vibrant hues in order to
breathe.
Some days my brain craved blue. From my large stash of
fabrics, I would pull a selection, spread them out in varying
combinations, and form a pleasing palette for my day's work.
Teal and midnight-blue patterns, cobalt stripes, a sprigged
hyacinth. Black with jagged ultramarine swirls. I would
arrange them next to each other, add two, subtract one. When I
had a group of seven or eight that looked right, I would begin
to cut and piece. I seldom had a prearranged plan in mind. My
body craved the colors and the kinetic act of cutting and
piecing, cutting and piecing.
To an old-time quilt maker, the notion of "piecing for cover"
implies making something serviceable for everyday use, as
distinct from a wedding quilt or the one put out for a special
houseguest. But to me, "piecing for cover" describes what I
did during the 18 months of my depression. I see a vivid image
of myself sheltered under a big quilt or surrounded by swaths
of fabric, hiding within their protective coloration. I hear
"piece for cover" as a phrase akin to "run for cover" or "take
cover." It evokes quilt making as an activity that protected
and camouflaged me during a time that, in retrospect, can be
described only as a breakdown of all "normal" systems.
It happened suddenly, in the middle of the summer of 1992. One
week I was laboring over the last third of a book I was
writing on American Indian women's art. The next week I was
paralyzed. All writers and scholars experience this
occasionally. To pass the time, we read novels, weed the
garden, bake cookies. A few hours or a few days later, the
work resumes. Or we sit at the desk, sharpen pencils, take
notes, shuffle index cards. In fits and starts, we get over
the hump, and a paragraph emerges. And then, slowly, another.
But I was in total revolt. I couldn't even walk by the desk,
never mind sit down at it. I had read about writer's block,
but in the two decades since I had embarked upon a career as
an art historian, it had never happened to me. I didn't really
believe in writer's block (the way some women don't believe in
menstrual cramps). Then suddenly I was doubled over, my
insides all blocked up.
I had been working on the book sporadically for five years. I
completed several other major projects during that time, but
this was the special one, the one that was going to be
different from my previous academic works. I called the
book-in-progress Dreaming of Double Woman: Reflections on the
Female Artist in the Native New World. The cover design
juxtaposed two images: a 19th-century black-and-white photo of
a Plains Indian woman seated on the ground, bent over her
beadwork, and a colorful, late-20th-century painting by Laurie
Houseman-Whitehawk, a Winnebago artist from Nebraska. In the
painting, a hip, modern Plains woman in traditional powwow
dress, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, stands with her hand on her
hip, looking directly out at the viewer. The book is about
historical Indian art as well as contemporary artists in bead,
fiber, clay, and paint. It critiques the traditional
stereotype of the Indian woman as drudge.
I had worked in many different parts of indigenous America for
the previous two decades, from Guatemala to the Canadian
Arctic, and I wanted this book to be a strong, vibrant
synthesis of my own and others' research, with a feminist
spin. In the realm of art, for centuries Native women have
combined their interests in bold graphic design, complex
technology, science, philosophy, religion, and community. The
book was more than two-thirds finished. Why had I suddenly
fallen mute?
Like the visual arts in Native American communities, quilt
making is still central to many American women's lives (be
they Anglo-, Afro-, Native, or any other qualifier) at the end
of the 20th century. We don't need to do it "for cover" in the
practical sense any more, for there are plenty of inexpensive
blankets simply to keep us warm. Today quilt making provides a
different sort of cover -- a space in women's lives. For some,
it is time out from the heavy responsibilities of raising
children and running a household. The full-time child
psychologist, educator, cook, referee, and family economist
needs an oasis. Many homemakers find that oasis in making
quilts.
Other women need an oasis from the arduous demands of
professions in which we travel to distant cities, write books,
report on the news, order pharmaceuticals, or vote on bills in
the state legislature.
In either case, we come to quilt making looking for a respite
from one set of challenges by embracing a very different set
-- involving color, pattern, sensuality, skill, and order, in
an ever-changing mixture.
I had sewn, sporadically, since childhood, had even made a
quilt or two. But what possessed me, that July afternoon, to
drive out to a fabric store and drop $600 on a Bernina (the
Mercedes of the sewing-machine world) and begin to cut and
piece? It was an unexplained craving, like an anemic person
craving apricots, kale, or steak for the iron. Some part of my
psyche knew what it needed. The scholar-me was just along for
the ride.
The piecing and quilt making continued from summer into fall.
I mastered Log Cabin, Card Tricks, Churn Dash, School House,
Bear Paw, and many other patterns whose names evoke vivid
images in the minds of quilters. By Christmas I had
transformed my large study -- the entire top floor of my house
-- from a scholar's retreat to a space divided equally between
writing and sewing.
The two halves have an uneasy alliance, however, mirroring the
warring factions in my psyche. Two of the three long trestle
tables that for years had held photos, Xerox copies, notes,
articles, and books-in-progress now hold fabric, patterns,
transparent rulers, graph paper, and pins. A tabletop placed
on two bookcases forms a tall cutting surface that allows me
to stand and work without straining my back. Beneath the table
are bins of cotton fabric, sorted by color. "My stash," as we
quilters call it.
New track lighting illuminates the side of the long,
rectangular room devoted to quilting. Meanwhile, the other
half of the room sits in shadow. Stacks of books and
photocopies and file folders of notes untouched in months
serve as a rebuke to the past 15 years of my life as a scholar
and professor. I struggle with how to reconcile the two parts
of me into a coherent whole.
In the past, I have found the writing of a book to be
relentlessly linear, doggedly logical. Building a scaffold of
argument based on the foundation of other people's prior
investigations. Meticulous library research. Endless pedantic
footnotes, proving that one has examined all previous
arguments and either incorporated or refuted them. It's an
exhausting and lonely business.
In my quilt making, I scorned precision, pattern, and
measurement. I craved the playful, the provisional. I needed
freewheeling and accidental. I worked intuitively, no rules,
starting with recognizable nuggets of pattern and then
exploding them, encircling them, fragmenting them.
I settled upon the term "Serendipity Quilts" for the work I
was doing. I looked up "serendipity" in the dictionary: "an
apparent aptitude for making fortunate discoveries
accidentally."
Every day I worked silently, as if in a trance. No talk or
music in the studio. All the noise was visual, the action
vigorous and energetic. It entailed constant movement from
cutting table, to sewing machine, to floor, to ironing board.
Each piece placed was improvisational, rapid. I wanted it to
grow organically, without benefit of too much rationality,
order, or predictability.
Serendipity Quilts are like the therapy sessions I embarked
upon seven months into Quilt Madness. Rationality, planning,
order, and control are not successful strategies in therapy.
Opening yourself to experiencing what's on your mind is. In
Serendipity Quilts, as well as in therapy, surprising
connections are made. Extraordinary patterns emerge. It's
important to trust that a larger pattern is being formed. It
takes a while to see it.
It was mute, kinetic activity in a field of color and pattern.
I was reprogramming my brain. Debugging. Brainwashing.
It must have worked. When I sat down to work on my Native
American art-history book after nine months of quilting, the
title and outline for this memoir, Quilting Lessons, came out
of my pen instead. Different neural patterns had been formed,
new pathways forged.
Toward the end of Quilt Madness, I published an essay in
Piecework magazine, only the second nonacademic publication of
my life. Called "Loss," it was about my resolution to find a
path through sorrow by making a mourning quilt, should my
husband die before me. I evidently touched a nerve, for some
extraordinary letters were forwarded to me from the magazine,
messages from women who had lost their mates. In the face of
their real grief, I felt humbled, almost embarrassed, by how
glib my words about an imagined grief seemed when set against
the naked sorrow in the lives of others.
The losses these women described were not always from death.
One wrote about the dissolving of an engagement and her
turning to quilting as solace in her grief over a marriage
that was not to be. As a neonatal nurse, she now runs
quilt-making workshops for parents who have lost their newborn
babies. All of the participants piece for cover, for comfort
from their grief. As she did with her broken engagement, they
must come to terms with a life that is not to be.
Another woman wrote, heartbreakingly and at great length,
about a loss that she said is worse than the loss of a mate
through death: the loss of a functioning partner whose body
lives on after a massively debilitating stroke. In the year
that she had sat at his bedside, she pieced for cover as she
railed against the universe for the loss of this vital man.
Any more words from me would have been sorely inadequate in
the face of her enormous rage and sorrow. But I sent some
fabric, to aid in her enterprise -- a mute but tender act of
support.
A third woman wrote about the pain of a double loss. For when
she lost her husband to cancer, she lost her ability to quilt
as well. Quilting was so closely linked with the domestic
tranquillity and joy of their evenings together that to quilt
just redoubled her grief.
So many stories are sheltered beneath these pieced coverlets.
As a country, we're engaged in a great national act of piecing
for cover -- the AIDS Quilt. The memorial panels, each three
feet by six feet, are pieced, appliqued, painted, collaged,
glued -- all manner of media and methods for forming them. At
the end of 1987, the AIDS Quilt had nearly 2,000 panels.
Today, more than 20,000 have been contributed to this national
quilt of mourning. How many football fields does it cover now?
Enough to shelter us all?
The panels of the AIDS Quilt commemorate thousands of vibrant
people whose lives were cut short. They also document the love
and pain of those left behind. Common Threads, the film made
in 1989 about the AIDS Quilt, documents the lives of some of
the dead and their survivors. It shows Tracey Torrey making a
panel for his lover, David Campbell, who has died; shortly
thereafter, diagnosed with AIDS himself, Torrey cuts and
paints his own panel, carefully filling in the letters of his
name and the military title that clearly was so central to his
identity. This moment in the film touched me like no other.
This was, to me, the last word in piecing for cover -- Naval
Commander T. E. Torrey creating his own emblematic shroud,
memorial, talisman, and monument. His oasis, his lone island,
in an enormous international archipelago of loss.
Compared with these huge, irretrievable losses, my loss was
decidedly minor: I didn't lose a life or a mate; I just
temporarily lost my way as a writer and an academic. But by
piecing for cover, I discovered what was fundamental.
The act of making patchwork quilts provided an oasis of grace
in my life. I pitched my pieced tent in that oasis, finding
shelter and warmth for my psyche. During those 18 months, my
oasis grew larger than the terrain around it, as I
compulsively filled 12or 14-hour days with cutting and
stitching.
I repeat: I was piecing for cover. I was quilting to save my
life.
I have long operated on the principle that I don't know what I
think until I see what comes out of my pen. When I was a
teenager and young woman, what came out were poems, short
stories, and lengthy journal entries. Since my early 20's it
has been a master's thesis, doctoral dissertation, several
dozen articles, and a number of books. But when, for almost a
year, nothing came out of my pen, I was stymied. Eleven months
were almost exclusively nonverbal and nonlinear, filled with
color. They also were filled with confusion over the loss of
my scholarly work. For during the months that the quilter
emerged, the scholar disappeared. From being a productive
writer and researcher, I was transformed -- seemingly
overnight -- into someone who lives and breathes for
patchwork.
From that total immersion I emerged transformed as a writer.
Part of the hard lesson I needed to learn was how to make my
work more like play, and how to enjoy the play of it rather
than get caught up in the relentless pursuit of the finish
line. My unconscious chose to shut down the writing sweatshop
entirely, in order that these lessons might take place. As my
therapist commented during one of my first consultations with
her (when, after eight months, my concern about my writer's
block threatened to spiral out of control), there is certainly
no more effective way of getting the attention of a writer
than to shut off the writing.
So the writing shut off, and the quilt making commenced. I
experienced the cutting and piecing of fabric as the most
delightfully absorbing play I had experienced since I was 10
years old. And like a small child, I played really hard. For,
as child psychiatrists observe, small children's play is hard
work. This is the job of childhood, to be hard at play.
While I did not consciously set out to change my life,
spending more than 21 months at play achieved precisely that.
I have learned to be more like the artists I had been writing
about. My own work is becoming more like the art I was looking
at and writing about in the book: freewheeling, inventive,
open to experimentation, playful.
My scholarly life, up to that point, had become the kind of
quilt that I am constitutionally unable to make: the kind for
which you choose a pattern block, make one, assess it, and
then make 29 more just like it. Although I admire these works
visually, the act of making them is too rigid and controlled
for me. Too much like work. I prefer to play.
Perhaps I had half-understood these issues intellectually, but
my long apprenticeship in the practice of women's art made me
learn them viscerally and kinesthetically. My work has become
physically active rather than immobile. Not sitting in one
chair at the computer, or hunched over books or a notepad for
hours on end. Instead, I'm much more likely to work in bits
and pieces. My Serendipity Quilt work involves multiple
patterns held in the eye simultaneously. This is very
different from the straightforward, linear, unfolding of a
narrative scholarly argument. I suspect I'll never fully
return to the paralysis of that scholarly model again. I've
outgrown it.
Janet Catherine Berlo is a professor of gender and women's
studies and of art history at the University of Rochester.
This essay is excerpted from her new book, Quilting Lessons:
Notes From the Scrap Bag of a Writer and Quilter, by
permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright
© 2001 by Janet Catherine Berlo.
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poster:allisonm
thread:5323
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