on Day 177, i wrote this about this new cloth:
I need a rearranged self, a re~designed self that can move in these days. I need to retrieve parts of an old self, create parts i have never chosen to have. Add these to the present self. I need a self that works with this Now. different, but much the same. but different in ways that the Present needs.
O K
it was a work away day, tomorrow is too. actually, every other day is an Alz B day while her son is gone. and that's part of my tenuousness, i realized this evening. to much OTHER going on. but it's how it is.
Still....i was anxious to get back home and see this cloth. see if it was as i'd remembered when i left the house this morning. it was. and also i knew more things. it began just so fast...stitched to the silk noile. when i got home, i layered it. in the middle, harem cloth, bottom some iron pot leaf dye muslin. IMPORTANT about this: the harem cloth must protrude on the right...it is squinched in the way that i love so much...so...This, sticking out from under the silk noile. ok. Then, on the left, there needed to be a left margin of the muslin. beyond the formal border of the Noile. that is where the Past lives and where i think it might, some of it, enter into the Present of the Noile.
was it too LONG? i tucked it under. But NO. not too long as much as there wasn't room enough at the top.
yes. Better.
OUT to feed the Goats and while there, coming back, one of the Stink Beetles. they are everywhere in the Southwest. clunking along in their singular way, stinky if you bother them...
and i REMEMBERED. i remembered going to Third Mesa in Hopi Land. i remembered going there because i'd seen a PBS program about it and about how it is there and in that program, there was an old woman, Helen Sekaquaptewa. in this program, in the background of it all through, was her singing. she was singing in a thin voice, but a very true voice. she was singing Hopi language. just her voice. in the back ground of the documentary about how corn and beans are planted, tended, how old buildings are let live, though they are dissolving with Time. i had seen this.
SO, when i finally made it to the SouthWest, i went there. i went there in my old Ford Econoline Van, Fern. and my dog, Lucy. and i drive up to Third Mesa. i went into the local "grocery store", saying to the cashier, " I am looking for Helen Sekaquaptewa". i asked if she could direct me to her home. She declined. No Nothing. i left. i sat a long time on the curb. i went back in. i said,
I am looking for Helen Sekaquaptewa. she said, and pointed with her lips....over there. I went over there. i asked a person in front of a home. no. they knew no such person. i sat. sat. sat.
i went back to the grocery and asked. over there. that house with the gate and the dog. ok.
and i honked the horn, as is courteous here, and a man came out. One of her sons. i tell him i have come to find Helen Sekaquaptewa because of the song she sang. he opens the gate. i go in, with a video camera and one of the fiber figures, dolls, i had made as a gift. in the house there, at a plain table is an old woman. a bowl of cherrios on the table and as she chases the last few cherrios around in the milk with her spoon, i tell her how i had listened to her singing on the TV, on that documentary about the Hopi of Third Mesa and how i had listened to that song and that my daughter was having a second child and wanted me to come home and how i NEEDED that song to take with me.
She listened. and said ok. and i asked her son if i could video her singing so i wouldn't forget and he said yes. but i could never use it for any purpose than my own. so i set up the camera on the tripod and sat at her feet. She began. the song is plaintif, thin, like maybe you could image Spider Woman singing. she sang.
and when she was finished, with tears in my eyes, i asked her to tell me the meaning of the Hopi words of this song, thinking it was going to be something oh so deep and sacred....
she said it was a lulabye often sung to the babies. about these black beetles, these stink bugs, and it was about how two were going down the road and one is asking to ride on the other one's back.
and she laughed.
