Quotation Curation
Amplifying the good words
Here are some thoughtworthy reading passages I’ve come across recently with an accompanying narrative. Think of this as the “annotated reading list” that your subscription promised. Some of my own writing will follow especially now that I’ve seen some through lines and interesting concepts emerge. I’m always saying that I’m always “composting” — a phrase I picked up from Ursula Le Guin — with regard to writing and sometimes I let that pile of old fruit ferment a little too long and forget to write anything at all. But maybe if I get in the habit of culling and sorting what I’m reading and thinking about then I actually will create stories myself. I’ve found that, sometimes, when you have collected enough material the story becomes obvious and beautiful. Like a bouquet of flowers, once you’ve got enough color and scents the arrangement practically makes itself.
Taste
For a while, I’ve been in a state of flux with regard to my identity. By most accounts, I’m a very different person now than I was five years ago and I’m probably more like who I was as a kid. These changes have taken a lot of work, self-reflection was a real challenge as a person who was skilled at the art of deception, manipulation, and compartmentalization. But I faced my demons, battled them, and came out the other side. This was symbolized in a hiking trip I did back in April 2022. In the Canyonlands National Park, I hiked solo for almost two weeks and it was a time where I really felt as though I was solidifying myself. As a “water-type”, it was compelling that the desert was calling me and it really became a symbolic journey for me — I’ve described it as a kilning process, where I had been wet clay, intentionally molded, and ready to harden. Clay, like any material of the earth, is alive though. I’ve grown and morphed and taken on new roles and responsibilities and it’s challenged me to continue to re-evaluate who I am and how I display that outwardly. As someone who cares a lot about aesthetics, I’ve realized that a lot of what I display through my wardrobe is outdated: it’s a lot of black, greys, and solid colors, basics, things that make me blend into the crowd. Not that I want to stand out and be bold, but I am a more confident person now and I have things to share with the world. So I’m slowly trying to morph my wardrobe and personal space in my house to accurately depict who I am and how I would like to be seen.
[W]hen you’re in a phase where your taste doesn’t feel as clear to you, where your resonance is more in flux, where you are confused about who you are and by extension: what you like, it can be easy to bypass opportunities for self-expression, because you’re not exactly sure what ‘self’ you want to express in that moment. You are in flux; and to a degree, your external life can reflect that. But as your sense of self becomes clearer, crisper, more alive, more defined, the things that *match* your crystallizing sense of self come into greater focus. You can understand and notice what makes you feel like you—a feeling you are already deeply, abundantly familiar with internally. The task then is to simply externalize with the tangible what you have come to know internally through the intangible.
When your taste comes into focus, it is essential to trust it. To dwell deeply in it. To let it come alive inside of you, and outside of you. To pursue and explore the things you deeply resonate with. I believe that taste is the fundamental unit of self-trust. When you know what you like and what you are pulled to, you begin to get a clearer image of yourself; and you start to show up more clearly, more honestly to the world. Trusting your taste helps you feel more like yourself, it reminds you that you have an opinion, and it gives you the opportunity to tell the world what that opinion is. You start to feel the ways in which your sense of self has updated; you feel the texture of your energy expressed in objects, in the things you are drawn to. And you lean into it because it is fun to adorn your life with what feels uniquely resonant now.
This is a natural cycle that follows any metamorphosis period—one where you crawled in as a caterpillar, unsure of yourself, confused and itchy for change, where your skin felt too tight and you sensed you were on the cusp of becoming something new. In that stage when nothing was calling to you, perhaps you felt a low tendency towards acquiring anything as an expression of yourself. Perhaps you wanted to be alone, inwards—metaphysically raw, naked, unadorned. But on the other side of that experience is a rebirth, an emergence as a butterfly with a deep inner knowing, and a willingness to be seen. A willingness to adorn your life with the beauty that uniquely resonates with you.
Rock Collection
I love collecting rocks. I think that stones tell stories about the earth and our experience with it. Again, as a “water-type” I find that rocks are the grounding energy I need when my inclination is to revel in the flow of chaos. So the following work really got me thinking about the language of the stones, gravel, and pebbles.
I am no expert on rocks, but my window sills are lined with pebbles. Most are unremarkable. Some round, some oval, most gray or brown or white; lots of quartz. Few are empirically special in any way, and when I die, I doubt anyone will see any reason to keep them. They are tied to my experiences—each one marks a day, a place, a serendipitous noticing, a greedy impulse. But beyond my flimsy meanings, each one is embodied time, the result of a specific aggregation of geologic events. Rocks speak, but I do not know their language. When I pick up a pebble, even when I can identify what it is and how it came to be wherever I found it, I feel like I am holding a mystery. Perhaps this is why it is so hard to set them back down.
…
Roger Caillois writes:
Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation. For a stone represents an obvious achievement, yet one arrived at without invention, skill, industry, or anything else that would make it a work in the human sense of the word, much less a work of art. The work comes later, as does art; but the far-off roots and hidden models of both lie in the obscure yet irresistible suggestions in nature.
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On September 1, 1885, The New York Sun published a story on ghosts in Connecticut that included the following anecdote:
Over near Middletown is a farmer named Edgar G. Stokes, a gentleman who is said to have graduated with honor in a New England college more than a quarter of a century ago… He owns the farm on which he lives, and it is valuable; not quite so valuable though as it once was, for Mr. Stokes’s eccentric disposition has somewhat changed the usual tactics that farmers pursue when they own fertile acres. The average man clears his soil of stones; Mr. Stokes has been piling rocks all over his land. Little by little the weakness—or philosophy—has grown upon him; and not only from every part of Middlesex County, but from every part of this State he has been accumulating wagonloads of pebbles and rocks. He seeks for no peculiar stone either in shape, color, or quality. If they are stones that is sufficient. And his theory is that stones have souls—souls, too, that are not so sordid and earthly as the souls that animate humanity. They are souls purified and exalted. In the rocks are the spirits of the greatest men who have lived in past ages, developed by some divinity until they have become worthy of their new abode. Napoleon Bonaparte’s soul inhabits a stone, so does Hannibal’s, so does Cæsar’s, but poor plebeian John Smith and William Jenkins, they never attained such immortality.
Farmer Stokes has dumped his rocks with more or less reverence all along his fields, and this by one name and that by another he knows and hails them all. A choice galaxy of the distinguished lights of the old days are in his possession, and just between the burly bits of granite at the very threshold of his home is a smooth-faced crystal from the Rocky Mountains. This stone has no soul yet.
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Roger Caillois thought that some stones embodied the traces of a lost language:
I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
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Under the definition for “cairn,” in Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, Linda Hogan notes that “one stone atop another says a human being was here, feeling, thinking.”
Women Artists and Powerful Patrons
I wanted to read this article hoping that it would mention Isabell Stewart Gardener. It did not, but it talked about the traditional role of women in Incan society to weave. I’ve been interested in weaving since I read a book about music (Alien Listening by Chua & Rehding) that made a parallel to Penelope weaving and unweaving and weaving again at the loom. I think that there’s a beautiful metaphor as memory being that weaving and unweaving and reweaving process that’s not unlike the stories that stones tell. That connection — stones and weaving — is worth exploring more for me and have been strong themes in my life semi-recently. But anyway, also my mom picked out Proverbs 31 to read at my wedding, which further solidified my intrigue in weaving especially with flax to make linen.
Poma de Ayala translated the term for “married woman,” ahuacoc huarmi, into Spanish as texedora, or weaver. Married women wove cloth for their households as well as for Inca noblemen and military leaders. Additionally, the government recruited some girls to serve as aclla or acllacona, women who made textiles full time for the empire. Alongside cloth, they were responsible for making chicha, or maize beer, for rituals. Some acllacona were ritually sacrificed; others were married to Inca noblemen; still others remained single and were expected to be celibate for life.14 A second, male group, the cumbicamayoc, also wove for the state. Art historians disagree on whether the two gendered groups specialized in different kinds of weaving.15
https://www.curationist.org/editorial-features/article/women-artists-and-powerful-patrons
Arachne and Athena
More weaving!! I challenged myself with writing a ballad and I want it to be about selkies, and I’ll probably write about this topic in the nearer future. In doing some research about different selkie myths, I checked out a book from the library that contains myths from around the world. Yes, it includes selkies but it also included this one. As someone who wrestles with God and struggles to find a personal relationship with Jesus, Arachne claiming that her skills were hers and hers alone resonated with me because she truly did not feel the impact of the gods on her life. This hubris gets her turned into a spider, but, like, in the story Arachne, a mortal, is truly better than Athena, a literal god, at weaving so I’m not sure what to make of that. It kinda feels like how Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church even though he truly believed in his critiques. Like, it’s a punishment but it’s an unjust one because what they said is true.
Arachne immediately rejected the idea of asking Athena for forgiveness. Instead, she claimed that she had done nothing wrong. Her art was hers and hers only. No one else had to get credit for it, even if that was Athena.
Then Arachne went a step further and challenged the goddess. Without realizing who was the old woman in front of her, she wondered why Athena does not come to contend with her. Certain that Arachne was not willing to ask for forgiveness, Athena revealed herself. At her sight, the nymphs and Phrygian women in Arachne’s workshop began worshipping the goddess.
Only Arachne stayed still. Though she was scared, she was stubborn enough to stay true to her word. Within moments, she was ready for the weaving competition, even though she understood that no good could come out of it for her.