[while washing the dishes]
the old year goes to its bed and the new one is waiting to be born
Here is a cherry stone, buried in a Frankish grave between the years 500 and 600 of the common era, so a cherry stone that is about 1800 years old as I write this. A cherry stone! Little nothing! I love the nothings we save and carry with us, that tell our stories in their embroidered details. When you look closely at an embroidered cloth you stop seeing the picture and begin to see the tiny thread marks on the textile’s perpendicular ground. Looking closely at the nothings of the world changes what it is possible for me to think a world can be. So I’ll look at this bit of vegetable matter a while as the old year puts itself to bed and the new one waits in the dark to come out with the stars.
A 19th-century financier from the US state of Connecticut gave the Frankish cherry stone to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in his will, and now it appears on their website, its image in the public domain. The cherry stone leaves the grave in the hand of the grave robber or archaeologist or scholar or tourist and travels—how? In the collecting box, in the wallet. It sits on the mahogany desk. Cherry stone, buried in a mouth perhaps, or in the intestine, or in a little bag of other fruit pits, or in a hand: food for the journey and a seed for planting trees in the afterlife. Assurance of orchards, or accident, or habit of ingestion.
Someone warps a loom with linen thread and weaves with linen thread, and someone—the same person? I can’t know—takes the woven cloth and wool thread dyed in five colors, and embroiders a motif. Clothing, altar cloth, shroud, or bed cover, I don’t know. The fragment of cloth makes its way from Egypt to Germany: the practice of removing things from Africa and taking them to Europe is not a secret. In the late 19th century we can attach a name to the cloth, though an owner’s rather than a maker’s. The cloth comes into the possession of Friedrich Fischbach, teacher of ornament and design and compiler of historic patterns. And when he dies, his books of crochet patterns and ornamental embroidery and templates for whitework go out into the world, and part of his textile collection goes to the Textile Museum at St Gall, and part to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Sometimes I think about the billions of books, objects, furnishings, pieces of clothing that have belonged to and been made by the world’s dead over the past centuries and I wonder that there are factories at all. Why would I need anything new when there are sets of silverware in secondhand shops and hand-me-down sweaters my mother saved for me? Who was it who said if you have two cloaks, give one away? In the museum’s glass cases, there is a reflection of a rubber raft, tiny and vulnerable on the Mediterranean, and then the guard calls out into the cool dim room don’t touch, please and I am returned to the here and now, where the cherry stone and the fragment of cloth are protected by alarms and doors and locks and laser security systems. How many hundreds of years ago was the cherry tree planted or grown or grafted onto rootstock, carried from the place now called Iran into places we now call Europe? In a delta spring 2500 years ago, the flax plants grow as high as a child’s head, and the ibises fly along a northbound river. A hand and an eye chose the colors and a hand and an eye made the pattern, and hands and eyes laid the cloth into the grave. All the wonders of the world.
How we care for the dead: we provision them. How we care for the living: we keep in mind how soon we are all the dead. The living know the needs of the body and the soul—warmth and quiet, safety and shelter, clean water and dignified work, worldmaking and housekeeping, questions and answers, letters and numbers, good food and companions to love us. The dead know that the cherry stone is carried under the tongue across dark water. There is no escape from that water or the stone in the mouth, no matter whether the little pouch sewn into your clothing is full of gold or full of seeds. The living and the dead huddle in the little stone, pull the cloth of the world around us. Little fruit-bead. Little woven fragment. Where you have been and where you came from, even the endowment-havers, even the gala-goers, even the private plane-takers, even the robber barons cannot pry from the silent mouth of that river.
A little year-end housekeeping:
Thank you for reading these essays over the past nine months. I have learned a lot and gained a lot by the practice of writing all 40 of them (!! —five were pieces that I had previously written). I’m looking forward to the next couple of months of weekly essays before this project ends at the beginning of March.
I appreciate your readership. It makes me get things written and put them out instead of holding my cards close to my chest, as is my inclination. I am especially pleased that having to write means that I have written things I’d long had in mind, in some cases for years—like this essay, about imagination and art and the vapidity of chat-gpt; and this essay, about what a ‘creative writing’ education is for; and this one, about blackberries and labor unions and August; and this one, about my dad and Claes Oldenburg; and this one, about the real and living costs of precarious employment in academia.
So thank you for being out there, and for sharing my work, and for writing to me with your thoughts. It’s meaningful to me, and I take it very seriously that you spend your time with my writing here.
You may already have heard that Substack’s administration has taken a Nazis-are-okay stance. Well, that’s shitty, if not entirely surprising. Substack makes no money from what I write, and I will never charge you to read it here. But I am thinking about how and whether to move off of Substack, and I hope that when I figure that out, you’ll find or follow me. Are we heading back to the internet of circa 2007? Will HTML Giant, poetry listservs, and Typepad craft blogs make a comeback? Is the real ever circling toward the ideal? We will find out.
In 2024 I’ll take a break from weekly writing for March, April, and May, and write just one piece each month. Beginning in June 2024 I hope to begin a new project (wherever I am at that point) that will again take a weekly form. I’m planning to turn some of the 2023 essays into small, beautifully made print objects. Information about that will come, if all goes to plan, during my March-May break.
Here are a couple of beautiful things for you.
I hope you and everyone you love and everyone they love are safe and well. I hope for an end to the bombardment of the people of Gaza. I hope for ease in your grief. I hope for peace on earth, in the sense that both hope and peace are active. For all of us, made by all of us. Happy, healthy, free, and just 2024.
Holding you and your words in tenderness 🤍
May this 2024 be a fruitful one for all of us as your words have meant so much to me the last few months.