Posted by sar on March 29, 2001, at 13:36:50
In reply to Article: Quilting to Save My Life, 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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> Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
poster:sar
thread:5323
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