The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, who was ninety years old, gave me a wonderful piece of embroidery that she had finished after me, having worked on it for years. Flowing geometries of blue, black, and white, coming together with amazing precision and amazing passion, it might have taken less time if he hadn't had to supplement his meager salary as a primary school teacher by cultivating potato fields and pruning plum trees in the Bulgarian countryside. Born in the last years of the Bulgarian monarchy that was briefly enjoyed after five centuries of Ottoman rule, she had worked in her embroidery during the communist dictatorship that began when she was five and would last until I was five. Denied admission to the university because of his family's opposition to the government, the grandmother never focused a single synapse on higher mathematics, yet her embroidery transcends the beautiful simplicity of the great theory – a living confirmation of the persistence of the astrologer Maria Mitchell needle as a tool of the mind.
She had learned this method from her grandmother, who had also learned it from her grandmother before that – generations of women use thread and needle to pattern a world of chaos and danger into something meaningful, something painful with feeling and time, defying the constraints of peaceful survival, and the orderly insistence of beauty.
In the year when the communist dictatorship closed its fist in Bulgaria, the English writer Rebecca West (December 21, 1892-March 15, 1983) – one of the most beautiful, subtle, loving and precise minds I have ever read – traveled to the Balkans and recounted her encounters with those ancient cultures. Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (public library), at its heart is the reckoning and relationship between art and life, between storytelling and endurance, between the things we make and the world we make.
In village after village, the West saw elderly women bent over their embroidery, they saw what they were doing as a way of “examining life as they lived it and asking their fate as it befell them” – a philosophy of living in an artistic way, passed down from generation to generation to make life more livable. You write:
Old ladies [are] not fully aware of their embroidered role in the preservation of their ancient culture: when an Englishwoman plays a Purcell sonata she will probably not feel that she is preserving an English musical tradition. However, these women are really aware that they are about some special business when they sew. I am told by a woman in England who has been collecting such embroideries for twenty years and who knows their makers well that it is a work of hands, those who are experts do not give away their mystery. Many of the themes that often appear in designs have words and symbolic meanings that can be captured by strangers, and a woman sometimes refuses to discuss the embroidery she has worked on a garment she has made herself. When they get married, they make hats for their grooms and about these they are always reserved. Here, indeed, is another proof of the impossibility of history. It cannot be enumerated the contents of a time when some of the most precious things were locked up in inaccessible parts and lost their essence when they were taken to any place where they were likely to be carefully examined, when their owners had no knowledge of the parts of their nature and kept such knowledge of themselves as they possessed secret.
In this West sees a standard model for everything we call culture:
Culture is not a tangible thing that can survive without any human agency. It can live only by the power of men to hold its structure, and respond to the warmth of its fires.
I look at my grandmother's embroidery, ablaze with her life, I pray like an Islamic mosaic, complete as a Euclidean testimony, and the closing words of the West sound like the bell of a great church of time:
If in the next million generations there is only one person born in every generation who will not stop asking about the nature of his destiny, even if we strip and mock him, one day we will learn the riddle of our universe. We will find out what work we are called to do.
In my early forties, living through bursts of incredible difficulty and mild heartache, I began to embroider – untrained, unpatterned, following no tradition, like a jazz improvisation on my grandmother's Bach cantatas. I did it every day, diligently, not understanding what it was doing for me but hoping it was doing something, changing something. It does. It was a way of learning, not with the mind but with the hands, that you have to make a hole to make a seam.
