At What Point in Time Do We Expect to Find Something Else?
What are we looking for?
I didn’t say what caused the stink and the digging last March. Here’s what we found: A dead and melting rat on the radiator shaped like a banana — the middle body lower then the head and the tail as it melted into the hot metal fins. That was the stench. Almost too much to share back then, but since we’ve named this two-room merge The Rat Room, it’s time I ‘fess up. And it wasn’t just that one, sad, sinking, stinking rat —there were rat mummies and rat poo. There was a rat’s nest made of things gathered, plastic paperish things from wrappings or plant trappings or whatever it is humans destroy things with that last forever. And there were skulls and bones and bits, but overall, not so much.
And what are these fragments to me anyway?
And what is much?
I am still looking through my old journals, but realize the tidy sections I’ve made here will never suffice. I am like a gigantic privy full of fragments and I won’t ever be the one to puzzle them together. I will instead, braid them. I will give them a new form in which they were never intended. I am nearly finished looking through the first journal that I started sharing from last week and I’ve begun digging into the next, and I’ve come to see it is still poetry time. The journal is full of guttural sounds and mostly bad lyrics to songs performed in front of other humans.
I went to bed singing this old song about the journal thief and an adventure with my mom, blended into one something, see?
My veins like vines decorate my arms, I follow with calloused fingertips ”Hug the tree-lined fences”, I say, “Hide, we gotta get away” She limps out in oncoming light and we play finger guns at traffic soldiers Is this what it takes to wake me up, goofy disguises, should I start all over? A minor thing a broken string. Nothing effects me Stolen words my stolen mind. All grown up I didn’t get angry this time I had to walk ‘long the water to get to the aeroplane to get back home again He said, “I’ll call for you a cab” I said, “No thanks, I’d rather take the walk” And when I got to the Beastie’s edge the water monster, relentlessly toppled me Each time I stood back up again, I didn’t know in which direction it sent me A minor thing a broken string. Nothing effects me Stolen words my stolen mind. All grown up I didn’t get angry this time
It is all a scavenger hunt and a piecing together of fragments because everything is sherds or shards and cracks and light and incomplete pages and sentences and thoughts and messy rooms and changing beings who remain the same in part. It all feels like so much this morning as I lament things missed and long for and things not done.
I messaged one of the few humans I get to miss in this world and she wrote back quickly and included photographs and said she is in Barcelona. Barcelona! We just returned from there! I may not hear from her for months now, or years even, though I begged. I can only imagine us running into one another there, I mean, we just fucking missed each other. By days.
”When did you arrive?”
Silence.
And thus, more fragments.
I was heartbroken when Walter took out the pocket doors and the built-in cabinets, as they were the parts of the house I first fell in love with. But they were practically floating on cairns of field stone and brick from the last restoration project done in the 1970s or so. In the transformation, we will make the house more useful. Whose life was it that I wanted to preserve anyway? I, the braider, shall take pleasure in this new space - both in the process which included digging up the old dirt floor and once again hauling rocks, to hanging up art. Already, I’ve started to gather treasures for the walls and ideas for new making. What would I be without these fragments that are all seeds?
ABOUT THE BOOK:
I made this one at an acquaintance’s house in Westport, Ireland. It was a glass house, as I remember it, by the sea and it had been raining for days. I bound the book to Luka Bloom and used my thighs as a book press. I got the paper and old leather in Amsterdam after the thief stole my journal.
The leather is old. It was taken off of furniture made a century ago. This was the first I made with old leather. My second journal. I learned how to make it from the Cat Journal I bought in Venice. This new one came undone in the same way! But this one is much bigger and with nicer paper. It is so full of tiny words and will take me forever to pick through.
I wrapped the book board with rice paper that I rolled in my fingers until soft. Then I put the old leather on top of the front and back covers - I didn’t wrap it around as it was too fragile. I cut an X out of book board and glued it to the spine piece. When I glued the leather on I spent some time pressing it around the X. The darker leather was new scrap. I also cut out strips of board to mimic, loosely, the stitching you see in other bindings, like this Tome that we make at Peg and Awl. I glued a premade headband in that was so long it came undone a thousand times. The book swelled with glued-in things. I put a tie on to hold it together.
How beautiful to think of a collection of fragmented journal entries as being a blended braid. Lovely.
Lovely, just lovely.