Monday, November 25, 2013

MASTERING CLOTH STITCH

for the cloth stitch in bobbin lace making see
 http://vikingmama.blogspot.com/2010/08/bobbin-lace-beginning-classe-complete.html

Bobbin Lace: Mastering Cloth Stitch


Too died he
taking away your sin, "here"
(mind your [k]not here mind right here)

what's tangled woven by day often reduced to the saved
and gotten away in the low empty vowel of the animal soul?

Too died he the way he is born, cattle lowing in the knot place and something
something like stone rolls away weighted in all meaning, too. This poem

is no instrument for politic or politics. Rather
like a work of female mind, (supposedly weaker) and she
looms here weighted in grief, waiting through a long absence with poetries
in [k]not here mind at work. Ask, too, like she, what is to be the great works
of the spirit of our times, woven by day, were these knots untangled this night
while in the spirit of such depths saved for this finer work.

O rosy and pink the new cloth paned, pinned in the lady working the lady [k]not, "here".

If you find your own way here at times, in space set aside
for human initiative (and in courage) pick up her thread and weave, too. Let the
new shroud mark where death dies pulling deep thread up and back into life; work

what she works
a lyrical contemplation
a political resistance racing the design*
(with necessary tension between, too.)

Let swaddle early
filament of paler pleroma, the glassy light no sun bodies, serpentine
and so coiled, horn the bobbin with [k]not language: horn to bobbin to pane to sk(e)in
is wound (skin not stitched but turned.) Bring something into being here of your own
experience; not you but like itself, saved

having weighted in absence a long time


*see the poem, "Arachne's Back Yard" by Dennis Patrick Slattery in "Feathered Ladder", Fisher King Press, publishing sometime between December, 2013 and Jan-March, 2014.


notes

Penelope

1. Etymology

The name of the faithful wife in the “Odyssey,” from Greek Penelopeia, is related to pene, “thread on the bobbin.”  From penos, meaning “web”, pene is cognate with Latin Pannus, (in English,“pane”) the nominative form of pannum and carries both senses of  “cloth garment” and “glass.”

2. Mythic Image In Art



 PENELOPE WAITING FOR ULYSSES
Painting by Rudolph von Deutsch.

An image of patient grief and endurance of absence, a tapestry woven by day. It stands on the frame of life waiting to be unraveled by night. For this image see also Shakespeare's Sonnet CXLVI, "The Death of Death."


You might notice in the painting,like I do, the crescent moon(upper right)proximate the contemplative Penelope waiting.

It is as if what are the great works of spirit that are to be of her own age, grace and shape, shape her a pillar of strength. Power, or "will to power" and strength are two different things.

Not of any age, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, but of the horn of the moon filling with the light of that day no sun (solar body aka “time” and “times”) can represent, she, then, represents best poetic mind’s reflection as it reflects on power not to be conflated with the uses of one as an instrument of power neither that politic in social orchestrations nor will to power of politics itself.

To say this another way, the image takes up poetic space in a depiction of the real that includes individual experience. It signifies a re-imagining underway, one reflective in human courage and initiative individually but from within a lyrical contemplation’s tension oppositorum in times. Timing and rhythm push the meter along individually by racing the design’s archetypal imprint leaving it’s mark upon the individual soul-making.


3. Sonnet CXLVI

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there's no more dying then.  ~ SHAKESPEARE.