Dear Jane III: Quilts and converstions; Art and conversation

When I posted Veronica's nearly-finished Country Crossroads quilt on Facebook just before Christmas, gifted ceramicist Jeannie Mah kindly wrote "Lovely! Your border is especially wonderful and flowing, a wonderfully exuberant touch to frame the detailed geometrics in a subtle range of red! and then some stitching on the white (which I always love!!) Well done, Kathleen.  Beauty!"  

The quilt is in conversation with itself:  the simple but heavily quilted white blocks balance the geometric, busier blocks, and as Jeannie noted (though I'm not entirely  happy with it), the border's flowing vines and rounded shapes, like the pomegranate at the centre of each border, contrast the geometry of the piecing.  As well, for each block to work, the contrast between colours, but even more between dark and light, has to be dramatic.

One of the reasons why I have long admired the "Dear Jane" quilt but never made any blocks was that each block seems a little lonely.  All of the blocks use a single fabric and muslin.  There's no conversation going on within the block as there is with my Country Crossroads.  But as I make more blocks, I can see that they are in conversation with one another.  Some of them largely involve calm squares, while others are made of triangles bursting off every which way. Some are made of dozens of tiny pieces, while others are made only of a few (I'm thinking of the blue and gold X here).  Muslin dominates in some, where others give a fanciful nineteenth-century reproduction fabric pride of place.  Some are busy; others are calm. 

I'm not sure I'm going to make all the blocks; it can take an entire afternoon to cut and piece a single block, like the brown one in the top right corner.  Each of those 8 little "flying geese" sections that radiate from the central square are a mere 3/4 inch by 1 1/2 inches.  You need to make them a little large and painstakingly cut them down to get them accurate.  I may simply make a handful and put them together in a small quilt.  But I'm getting the drift of Jane's aesthetic, though it's not entirely balanced in my photograph.  When you put the blocks together, it's like the perfect party.  You've got your clown, who keeps everyone cheerful and entertained.  You've got your introspective soul who breaks in with the most extraordinary observations about life, the universe, and everything, so that she always leaves you shaking your head.  There are the good souls (read a bit square) who are the foundation of any community or party, and the slightly manic people who go off in all directions but are so creative, so innovative, so out there that they inspire all of us.

I don't know whether you have noticed, but the words "conversation" and "dialogue" have become part of our political discourse.  This may in part be a product of the Trudeau government, which has from the beginning said they wanted to know what Canadians were thinking about as they go about the business of governing.  I can be appropriately cynical; Trudeau's latest cross country tour was clearly designed as a kind of distraction, and I'm not sure that the 'conversation' around how we would elect our leaders--hard as that committee worked--was given the hearing it deserved.  But still, I think conversation is good.  

Only this week, in the Globe and Mail, the organizers of "Growing Room,|" A Room of One's Own's fortieth birthday party note that some of the people they had invited to come some time ago have shown up on the "wrong" side of the Stephen Galloway firing at UBC.  (I use 'wrong' ironically; we haven't given enough information by either UBC or its Accountability person to come to a conclusion.)  In this case, two sets of rights seem to conflict:  those of the women who--and here as I am about to use verbs, I myself am in trouble--told of being sexually harassed by Galloway, and those of an academic/writer who deserves a clear explanation of the reasons for firing him.  And since this case involves the rest of his career, he has the right to have those reasons made public if he so chooses.  Yet the organizers of the Room birthday party thought that bringing all these disparate perspectives together and creating a dialogue would be helpful.  A Room of One's Own's publisher, Meghan Bell says that "I think conversation is the best antidote to conflict....I hope the festival will get people talking in person."  Festival director Arielle Spence says "It's somethiing we expect people are going to want to talk about....We hope that that event will create space for discussion, for potential ideas of ways that we can move forward."

Similarly, in this month's Literary Review of Canada, reviewer Naheed Mustafa reviews two quite different books about feminism, Jessa Crispin's Why I Am Not a Feminist:  A Feminist Manifesto, and Erin Winkler's Notes from a Feminist Killjoy:  Essays on Everyday Life.  In her review, which is very much worth reading, and which I cannot possibly do justice to, Mustafa identifies five kinds of feminism which occasionally, though too rarely, intersect:  the feminism of white women, the feminism of women of colour, the feminism coloured by women's religious loyalties, the feminism of class, and the feminism of age.  I admit to experiencing a lot of inner conflict even typing that list. My first response is to say "Yeah!  Wow!  All those perspectives!  We should be able to come up with something really good if we see ourselves are learners rather than experts and just listen and remain curious."  That's my inner idealist.  The realist in me realizes that the distinction between--and I'm being provocative with my use of language here--brown feminism and white feminism is as old as feminism itself and is deeply disturbing.  Mostly disturbing, frankly, is "white" feminism with its rather naive and narcissistic concern for glass ceilings and power structures.  Yes, we have to change things at the top.  We know that until the very nature of power is challenged--I myself would rather have autonomy than power:  wouldn't life be rich?--women are going to have to continue to fight.  But let's give some support to the women in the trenches.  I would really love to just listen to a Muslim woman help me understand the meaning of her headscarf and the meaning of her feminism.  Thankfully, Mustafa too foregrounds the conversation, ending her essay with this wonderful image of Brownian motion exemplified by "a piece of pollen moving around in a glass of water that is "erratic and kinetic":  "I find myself recalling that speck of pollen in water as I observe--again, I am the observer--bobbing along, bombarded by a multitude of opinions and arguments.  The motion of these conversations is constant and unstopping.  Like the pollen, they will never settle.  Perhaps that is the point."

But conversation isn't simply an important part of our political discourse, it's crucial to our aesthetic and ethical lives.  I have just finished reading Michael Helm's novel, After James, which is really three slightly linked novellas, each told in a different genre--the gothic tale, detective fiction, the apocalyptic narrative.  The novellas share some images, the name 'James,' and an overwhelming sense that our twenty-first century world, with its technology and its science, is  slipping off its moorings.  Few authorities are to be trusted.  The only solution is, in a sense, is to go off the grid.  The reader's task at the end of the novel is to consider how these three narratives inform one another, how they work together as a novel, how they establish a conversation with one another and with the reader.  Helm's view of the present moment is very dark, but the structure left me with enough space--enough of a part of the conversation--that I can decide how I relate to or believe in the malevolent forces abroad in the twenty-first century.  He respects me enough to let me do that.

I have also just finished re-reading Julian Barnes's biographical novel about Dmitri Shostakovitch.  The very label "biographical novel" raises eyebrows.  Clearly Barnes has done his research and can exploit the wonderful details of Shostakovitch's life when Stalin led the Soviet Union and Shostakovitch didn't write the "realist" (what does realism mean when it's applied to music?) work that would exemplify Lenin's notion that "art belongs to everyone."  Sure that the KGB were going to come for him, he spent every night for quite a while standing in the hallway of his apartment building next to the lift so that when the police came they wouldn't disturb his wife and daughter.  The 'novel' has very little in the way of plot; rather it's a meditation on how an artist keeps his integrity in the face of threats and blandishments offered by his government.  Barnes explores this question, but never answers it.  We need to provide that answer for ourselves.

Virginia Woolf famously loved conversations.  After all, that was what Bloomsbury was built on.  At the same time, she begins A Room of One's Own with that famous opening--"But, you may say, we asked you to write about women and fiction.  What does that have to do with a room of one's own?"  ('Autonomy,' I slyly answer.)  Those first two words, though, establish her sense that her words are simply part of a conversation, as does her instruction to her audience at the end.  Observing that while she has been speaking "you no doubt have been observing her failings and foibles and deciding what effect they have had on your opinions.  You have been contradicting her and making whatever additions and deductions seem good to you.  That is all as it should be, for in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error."  Noting that the reading of books makes one see "more intensely afterwards," she of course suggests that they write books.  But there is a caveat: "Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted.  Think of things in themselves."  She and Mustafa would have a lot to say to one another as they compare what they see to what the other sees in a friendly and curious way that Woolf has.

But how am I going to get back to Jane's quilt, having come by way of novels written by men and articles on feminism--with a detour through public discourse and the policies of the Liberal government?  I suggested that my "Dear Jane" blogs, given that Jane was born two hundred years ago, would be a kind of anti-Trump meditation, because she made beautiful, useful things while he only has made money.  But I am tired of Trump.  I am going to reduce him to Tweets and innuendo and government by executive order, and merely point out that he is not interested in conversation.

Elaine Scarry, in her wonderful, brief book,  On Beauty and Being Just, argues that qualities of beauty, like the unity of the work of art or the overarching beauty of a sky that stands over all of us, keep ideas of justice alive when justice has withdrawn.  I am going to suggest that works of art, whether they are quilts or novels, have something of the same function.  They show respect for us, giving us the freedom to come to our own conclusions.  They keep conversation and dialogue alive. They keep our curiosity alive.  In the face of government by Tweet, innuendo, and executive orders, we are going to need reminders of such respect, such curiosity, such dialogue.