The phrase above - "making things" - amounts almost to the Baroque manifesto. There is something sacramental in the activity, regardless of which particular activity it might be.*
When I was about 12 it was pancakes: once I realised it was possible to have pancakes any time I wanted, I was free. (I became obsessive about technique: they had to be the best pancakes. Mix the batter just enough to moisten it all. Don't worry about lumps, they cook out. Yogurt makes the pancakes fluffier, but you need more milk.) Then it was muffins, cakes, the world.
Before that, paper dolls and dresses: hours and days I sat at the dining room table, looking up period costumes in the encyclopedia and drawing exaggerated leg-o'mutton sleeves (with tabs) and farthingales. I've lost the shoebox full of paper dolls - I don't know for sure when or how. It's still a regret. All that remains from that period is a statue of Elizabeth I I made out of a bleach bottle, and dressed (quite authentically!) in silk, with a lace-doily ruff and a huge pearl pendant. (I have spent half my morning looking for a picture I know exists of this figure. If I find it, I will post it.)
I drew, and drew, and drew. I looked, and drew. (I was also obsessed with types of pencils.) When did I stop drawing? Sometime. Why? I have no idea. It was only my own efforts.
Then I used to make my own clothes. In my hippy teens (the hippies themselves found me utterly unconvincing, by the way, with my Mozart records, Ezra Pound poems and fascination with history; all they cared for was raw food and nuclear disarmament). I made clothes from folkloric patterns using fabric from our overstuffed attic, and wore them with long earrings and jackets from the forties.
Of course I wrote, too. I filled endless notebooks! Journals, poems, stories with no plots. I searched for tone and structure, without knowing what it was I was looking for. But it was harder to manipulate the material, to structure ideas than to structure a seam. And there were people around me who could help with the sewing. No one can help with writing. Well - they did what they could... looking back I can see I had a lot of encouragement, but no advice about how to develop a plot. (Someone should have given me Aspects of the Novel; in it, Forster even laments the prosaic need for a story, and then delineates the layers with which a plot grows. Anyway, there can be something crude about a story, like leaving thread hanging down off a hem.)
When I was a little girl I hated full fashioning. All those labels: "fully fashioned" - as if there were an alternative in any case! Little Miss B was the kind of child that things got on the nerves of. All those annoying stitches, going up along the join of ladies' sweaters, so naked in their purely utilitarian intent! It seemed, at best, making a virtue of necessity. Like darts. I also hated darts on ladies' blouses: they just seemed a bit coarse to me, a bit "must we really discuss this"?
I can also remember railing on against Ethan Frome in 8th grade, because Edith Wharton had set her story in a town called Starkville. Starkville! It offended me. I can remember shouting at my friends, "What, they don't think we'll get it otherwise???" I think were were sledding in the park at the time. My friends didn't care, though we did talk (the boys among us with some relish, I recall) about what it would be like to hit a tree. (That also annoyed me. A tree. Honestly. Like we wouldn't get it otherwise?)
But of course, the lesson is this, and the fascination too: we cannot escape from the physical. We are prisoners of the three dimensions, and everything we make on this earth must obey their laws.
Of course fabrics are much stretchier now than they were then. But that is just a cop-out, and it is in the cop-out that the revelation resides. Once you get used to crappily-made garments which use stretchy fabric as a rationale for not being properly shaped, you come to realise the utter gorgeousness of full fashioning. It's like cloth-covered buttons. I was so happy in the eighties when they came back in. I had felt cheated.
In my twenties I made clothes without buying patterns. I even made clothes I didn't like, just for the technical challenges they presented. I learned how to knit and for many years was obsessed with colour, texture, and the incredible way you can turn a piece of string into a three-dimensional object. I learned sophisticated stitch techniques for shaping collars, necklines, shoulders: if you knit well enough you should never have to sew a seam.
I still think Wharton possibly overstated her case a bit: that is why (to be crude) she is not Henry James. (The ex-ex-Mr B bitterly resented my love of Henry James, and thought that for a person to read novels for "structure" was the sickest thing he'd ever heard of. I think he was just jealous.) But I can now see that what I used to consider merely blindingly obvious in fact has a beauty in it: sometimes, reduced to mere suggestion, a thing turns to wisps and drifts away. Sometimes we need outright reference, not just allusion. We need the name, the word, the handle, and of course this will be beautiful in itself, because it is an artefact. What is the source of this beauty? What is its nature? I'm still not sure.
Milan Kundera, in his new book of essays The Curtain (widely excerpted in the press; pictured here with its unforgivably ugly UK cover), talks about the chronological nature of our understanding of even a single, discrete work of art. This is another thing that used to puzzle and concern me when I was a child, and I can remember following Mama Baroque around the house, saying, "But Mommy, why? Why, if I wrote a poem right now that was just as good as a poem by Shelley, if it sounded like Shelley, would it not be as good???" Kundera discusses this phenomenon, and compellingly; but, although he seems to think he has solved the riddle, he hasn't. He simply nods towards it and digs into his argument, which is a disappointment, as it means his essay is necessarily only one man's opinion. It strikes me as a lack of ambition.
I also love the anecdote with which he opens this passage: I could certainly have related to this when I was a child, learning about making things. He writes:
"They used to tell a story about my father, who was a musician. He is out with friends someplace when, from a radio or a phonograph, they hear the strains of a symphony.
The friends, all of them musicians or music buffs, immediately recognize Beethoven's Ninth. They ask my father, 'What's that playing?' After long thought he says, 'It sounds like Beethoven.' They all stifle a laugh: my father doesn't recognize the Ninth Symphony! 'Are you sure?' 'Yes,' says my father, 'Late Beethoven.' 'How do you know it's late?' He points out a certain harmonic shift that the younger Beethoven could never have used."
But to me, this anecdote is primarily about something other than mere chronology, though I can certainly see in it the chronology Kundera makes use of. Though maybe that is me objecting to the darts again.
I nearly became a freelance knitwear designer: I was in meetings with wholesalers when my cousin died, and that just stopped - why did it? I have shelves of books on pattern-cutting, shoulder-shaping, traditional stitches, lace patterns. Under the baroque bunk beds (you can see why the kids go to their dad's place) there are bin liners full of silks, cottons, wools you can't even get now. When both my grandmothers died I got their needles. (And Mlle B's Groovy Girls have the best doll clothes I've ever seen.)
Now, when I write, I sometimes notice the tension between the abstractness of it and the pure physicality of the world. I often think, when working on a poem, that it would make a better film or photograph or picture. Sometimes all you really want to do is point out a line, the fall of the light. Sometimes words seem too crude.
Sometimes I feel reluctant to write. I've never been sure why this is. Maybe it's a bit scary, all that communing inside oneself: you never know what you're going to turn up, like all the old stuff in our old attic. I've been known to have to go have a sleep, right in the middle of it.
* To those of you who are thinking, "Oh yes Ms Smartypants, what about making guns and electric cattleprods?" I will say that the act of making something well, and carefully, is certainly intrinsic to the best parts of human existence - but that like anything else in this life it can be turned to evil. I'm not trying to have a philosophical debate (as you can tell from my often-inflated terms, in any case!). Of course I would rather someone were watching Big Brother or whatever than making implements of harm.
