Dear Indira,
I read your letter the other day. I’m sure you know the one: written to Gunta, talking about her weavings as grief-portals composed of grief-threads. It undid me, to the point it only feels fair for you and I to be in correspondence too. Just as you stood in the MoMa, unspooling your grief-thread to trace its origin back to her wall hanging before you, I now carefully tether my own threads to you, to Gunta, to grief.
Yours, hers, my own.
You describe so many sentiments weavers are sensitive to, but I am particularly struck by your poetics on space, describing the interlocking of warp and weft as moments of correspondence, memories that link to one another, but also propel us forward, making both weaving and grief into durational projects. The cloth becomes a record and a container: marking and holding all the things our body can no longer contain.
Space. As in position, direction, orientation. Implying expanse, distance, perhaps even longing. It made me realize: you and I are talking about the same thing. The only difference is that I’ve been calling it presence. As in existence, hereness rather than awayness. Perhaps even present, both now-ness and a gift. I have been using this to describe where I am, where I have been, where I am going.
More recently, I have been using it to describe what is left behind. When there is a separation, a leaving, a death, a breakup, it is never split cleanly. The coming together is homogenous, free of division in favor of a union. Therefore, the splitting cannot ever reproduce how both sides began; they emerge changed. Which means there are always pieces left behind.
There is always dust.
Just as weaving is durational, dust links the past with the present, highlighting the passage of time with stillness. Something has left and in its wake are fragments, phantoms, remnants. Dust envelopes a surface, not quite freezing it into place, but rather highlighting its touch or lack thereof; if I run my fingers over it, the dust remembers my touch and memorializes the gesture. The action is over, but the impression remains.
Something ended, but still I am here. Whether I am one side of a separation or the resulting debris, I am unsure. Perhaps, I am a little of both; I did say that both sides never reemerge as they once began. Which is not to say that I am broken, but perhaps rather my matter, my being, my composition is altered—solid to gas, corporeal to immaterial, once made of water but now made of dust.
This grief has made a haunting of me, a specter of longing. I glance down at the floor and see only one set of footprints now, swaying alone. I wipe her memory away, but only succeed in making a bigger mess, leaving smudges on everything I touch. I empty myself into my weavings again and again. I turn dust into dust. That’s all I can do.
Tell me it gets easier,
Rin
