Jane A. Stickle (nee Blakeley) was born two hundred years ago this coming April 8. We know little about her that cannot be inferred from her father's will or various nineteenth-century censuses, except for the remarkable quilt she designed and made during the Civil War. She signed her quilt "In War Time 1863. Pieces 5602, Jane A. Stickle." When Donna Bister and Richard Cleveland were working on their book of historical quilts, Plain and Fancy, they visited the Bennington Museum after hearing that it had a collection of quilts. The Stickle quilt was subsequenly chosen for the cover of their book, and travelled to the Vermont Quilt Festival, the Quilt Market in Houston, and was subsequently hung in the Vermont State House exhibition celebrating the state's quilters. Brenda Manges Papadakis, who fell in love with the quilt on the cover of Plain and Fancy, who was a math teacher, and who began drafting quilt blocks from the photograph, finally went to Vermont to see what she could learn about its maker. Very little, aside from where she is buried, where she lived for a time, that her father's will made note of a quilt that constituted part of his inheritance, and that several census records raise more mysteries than they solve. Why did her husband move away for ten years, leaving her in charge of the farm? What happened after his subsequent return in 1870 to force them to declare bankruptcy in 1877? What did she do after his death, during the long time when she lived as a boarder until her own death in 1896?
It could be worse: at least she signed her work, something many quilters (I'm one of them) did not do, thinking it was merely "craft." The fact that there are no children, no letters, no diary makes her a little unusual: these resources are the staples of quilt historians' research. It has occurred to me that she might have been illiterate. But math and geometry presented no difficulties to this inventive woman. We see this first in the most disarming place: her choice to make her blocks 4 1/2 inches square. Many quilt blocks are built on a grid of 3 or 4, meaning that the block is composed of squares three across and three down or four across and four down. Sometimes that grid is supplemented with triangles or rectangles, but the grid itself forms a framework for your math.
I don't have any simple examples around, but if you stare at this photograph for a few minutes, you can see that it's a 3-grid. The size of the square in the middle of this churn dash block is the same size as the square made by the two triangles and the square made by the two rectangles.
The Puss in the Corner block is a four grid. You can see that the
rectangles are twice the size of the squares in each corner. Taking the
squares as your basic unit, you can then see that the block is easily
divided into four.Jane Stickle's decision to make her blocks 4 1/2 inches square means that she can divide it into either a grid of 3 or a grid of 4. If she's using three, the squares will be 1 1/2 inches; if she's using a four grid, they will be 1 1/8--a very unusual size. This first decision gives her enormous flexibility.
The signature on her quilt tells us something about its composition: that she is purposefully highlighting her quilt's relation to the Civil War. As I have said in an earlier blog, I can easily imagine her using the challenges of this extraordinary quilt to distract her from historical cataclysm. Her practice informs mine. I have decided to make this quilt during Trumptime as a way of meditating on something besides Trump's presidency and keeping alive a set of values antithetical to his. Whereas he is all carelessness and bluster, Jane's blocks are ordered and inventive. Where he stands for extrinsic values--money and fame and power, she represents the intrinsic values of delight in invention and craftsmanship. He makes money and hate; she makes quilts. How different can they be?
We can have no idea which block Jane made first, but the first block in Brenda Papadakis's book is a variation on the pinwheel. I have put my block next to a conventional pinwheel block from another quilt I'm working on. The first thing you notice is that she's got some very tiny pieces if you consider that each square in the grid is a mere 1 1/8 inrches. You also see that hers suggests a pinwheel almost exploding, pieces flying off from centrifugal force. If you are a poet or scholar or reader, like me, the block prompts you to intone the opening lines of Yeats's "Second Coming":
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Now I don't think it's always a problem when the "falcon cannot hear the falconer" and when the centre does not hold. There are times in history when revolutionary change is desperately needed. When apartheid finally crumbled. When the Berlin Wall was taken down. When the Soviet Union once again became merely Russia and stopped imposing its ideology on its satellites. Maybe even the French Revolution, bloody as it was. In fact, I have a character in a story who finds she needs time to rebel against the centripetal force of motherhood that threatens to reduce her to a single point: her identity as mother. So she tells her husband "Maybe the falcon would like lunch for a change. To eat slowly, not rush back to the falconer." This desire for centrifugal force in her life also leads her to rebel against the rituals and timetables of her domestic existence: "Instead of filling up on Saturday, I want to run out of gas and meet my spiritual teacher on the road, who just happens to have a full jerry can in the trunk."
But making Jane's complicated and exploding pinwheel block gave me a chance to meditate on circumstances when change is not going to be helpful to the majority of people in a country. The first occurs when language has gone wonky, when we know that a leader's words reflect only his desired version of reality, his self-interested, egotistical version of reality. The second occurs when that leader is the centre, rather than his ideas about improving the lives of the community he leads.
Barack Obama's wonderful farewell speech on Tuesday night was an example of how important words are to the act of leadership. I suspect most of you were enthralled by the clarity and inclusiveness of his ideas and words: the beauty of the speech caught our attention. We could also see how effective it is when the words of a leader that mean what we all think they mean and when the intention of those words is to touch us, not simply provide the cloud of fiction for the president-elect to hide in. We could also see in those words the fact that leadership is meant to unite, not divide. Obama's meditation on citizenship did not focus on the individual but on what we can bring to the collective.
Language is at the centre of the social contract. We can't even have a social contract without words. But when words lose their meaning and are employed to elevate the leader, not to rally the citizens behind a nobler vision we can all pursue, we know we are on the edge of a dictatorship, loosely defined. We are at the edge of the same kind of crisis that prompted Jane A. Stickle to create a quilt block that reflects centrifugal force: what happens when the centre is empty of meaningful words.
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