The Embodied Knowing of Unraveling: Beth, the Textile Artist (#5)
In the beginning of The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh describes the time he happened to be on an unknown street that happened to be struck by a freakish cyclone, the first tornado to ever strike in Delhi. As he crouched behind a balcony, the air was filled with flying debris — bicycles, lampposts, entire tea stalls. He writes, “In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power”(13). What is happening? Where am I? Why is there a bicycle in the sky? He describes the moment thus:
What happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld. And in that instant of contact something was planted deep in my mind, something irreducibly mysterious, something quite apart from the danger that I had been in and the destruction that I had witnessed; something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life (14–15).
The Great Derangement is about how climate change, for novelists, doesnʻt usually make for great plot, because it is slow, dispersed through time and space which are the essential boundaries of a novel. Something about this derangement was in the back of my mind thorughout my conversation with Beth*, an innovative studio art and textiles professor at University of the Pacific** (*a pseudonymous name **a pseudonymous place).
Perhaps it was the time and space of our meeting, at a picnic table in the early morning of the last Friday that anyone was allowed on a college campus pretty much anywhere. As if we were two characters in a novel, there was some foreshadowing of what was about to intersect with our lives. The mandate to move our classes online had come, but the Covid 19 vortex was not yet overhead. It was still a soft, cool Friday morning. The interview recording was cleverly punctuated by the chirpy sounds of birds and chickens.
Beth is softspoken, serious, and intense. She conducts herself with the graceful humility one learns as an outsider to indigenous and island cultures. She is very highly regarded as textile artist, and she this causes me to notice her clothing; soft cottons or flannels in colors that look either hand-dyed or much-laundered; blue, green, grey: the color of eyes. In contrast to her soft clothes I suspect that her hands, if I had held them, would be rough and calloused from many hours spent unraveling fishing nets and other oceangoing ropes, by hand. “Itʻs really slow and it takes a lot of time,” she said, describing the time she spends thinking and not-thinking about water, the ocean, culture, herself. She dries and sun bleaches the materials in her yard, and then:
When I unravel them a lot of debris falls out…I guess it’s like a metaphor of the embodied knowledge of unraveling, of letting things fall apart, letting things that are unnecessary slip out, before working to reorder those into a new form. It’s like moving to a new place, untangling the framework that was once intact about what holds value, letting go of the particles that are no good anymore, and then letting go of that. There’s a very embodied knowledge in the arts. It’s not like I ever thought, ‘oh, I need to do a piece on climate change’ … it’s more that dropping out some of the external distractions we think are so important gives room to see things in a different way. That’s what’s so exciting, and terrifying, about art practice, and teaching art practice.
I got to know Beth at a workshop I co-faciliated in early January of this strange year, which was called Teaching Climate Change Affectively and included the wonderful work of Joanna Macy, adapted for college classrooms. Beth referred to the workshop, and to Macyʻs book, Active Hope, several times in our conversation. “It’s these abstract qualities that we need to be teaching,” she said. Like flexibility, and being able to think outside the box, and how to organize things in new ways. “The arts are constantly teaching people to trust their own decision-making process. You’re making a drawing, you gotta make a million decisions, there’s not a clear right or wrong…You’re training yourself to trust your judgement.”
We talked about hope, and about being mothers, and also about growing up during the Cold War. She was influenced by the frugality of her grandparents, Irish immigrants from the potato famine, and by her father’s belief that nuclear holocaust was imminent (which, in fact, it may still be). Beth said, “I wish my dad had helped me recognize (well maybe he did, given where I am now) that whatever happens I can live a meaningful life through whatever scary thing is going to happen. Active Hope has been a super helpful book. What is the narrative that I am playing for my daughter? I used to think I could help stop this, but now I’m thinking about how to maintain my humanity, and my daughter’s.”
How do we maintain humanity through whatever the hell is about to hit us?
The message that the earth is getting hotter and hotter, she says, needs to be balanced with “Look at these beautiful trees! Being joyful is not pollyannaish, it’s what actually going to be helpful helping us deal with a difficult time.”
And all of this was before Coronavirus. Funny how we had no idea, two weeks ago, that we’d be in a shelter-in-place order — the surprise plot twist of Spring 2020. Beth had just met with her students for the last time, and told them they’d be meeting online instead of the woodshop, as scheduled. “It was kind of like a Joanna Macy moment. We started with ʻwhat are your concerns’ and then ʻwhat are the opportunities’ and that little conversation at the beginning of class….it feels like those conversations need to happen more. The world isnʻt making sense right now for many people. We get a lot of information that doesn’t make sense. How do you get more comfortable with things being incongrous, inconsistent?”
Let me describe a few of the classes that Beth teaches. First, there is Woven Structures, which also meets a Writing Intensive requirement. Students have no idea what they’re getting into. And then there’s her sustainability class, Use, Re-use, and Radical Re-use; and also Performance/Installation Art, a class she recently redesigned around a theme of Water. “I was getting too rigid in my way of being in the world. I wanted to be thinking in my practice about water, water’s potential for change, water’s flexibility.” The class even studied the speeches of Greta Thunberg as performative art in its original sense of political expression, “a way of saying something that couldn’t be usurped by capitalism.”
Beth has lived in the desert, where she was always thirsty, in Oregon, where there was lots of water, and now on an island in the Pacific, where water and sea level rise threaten island communities. In the performance art class they went to the film, Aquarela, in the theatre and discussed Water as the protagonist of the film: “cars are falling into Arctic ice, huge waves, it’s visually awe-inspiring and terrifying, intense.”
The class also walked up a stream, following it from campus back to its mountain source. They worked in a community-based taro patch, hosted a discussion with a climate scientist, and had a guest lecture from a physiologist who talked about water in the body. “I can’t be an expert in both climate science and artistic practice, so it helps when I can being in somebody who has the knowledge base, and then we can respond to that and talk from different knowledge bases.”
The human body has a fragility that can help us understand climate change. A fever of 103, only five degrees from normal, can be deadly to the human body; a five degree mean temperature rise is essentially an uninhabitable earth. Beth knows this fragility; when she was getting her BFA and then MFA in painting (which, by the way, came after Her Ph.D. in Psychology), she developed a chemical sensitivity and got very sick from the pigments in the paint she was using. As if the water in her body was poisoned. That’s how she got into the more benign found materials she uses now: weaving ropes, sewing paper. She came, almost backwards, from psychological research to art practice to teaching students about climate change, all through embodied artistic practice.
Towards the end of our interview, campus started to wake up, and on the recording, the sound of birds is taken over by the roar of a leafblower. We return to the topic of coronavirus, and she said her students seemed excited about meeting online. “Itʻs not going to be business as usual. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very concerned about this coronavirus, but it could also be a great wake up call, like hel-lo! Let’s see how we’re going to do this! It’s an opportunity to look at what we are doing locally and the intersections globally.”
Beth made me think that Covid 19 might be an opportunity to connect with our humanity and know that we can still be okay when scary things happen. As I pondered this, the roaring leafblower came closer and our conversation was drowned out by the moment.
