Category: Literature

Gilgamesh—As You’ve Never Seen It

Click above to play this Gilgamesh quilt video.

Where did this fantastic work of art come from?

Writes Rachel Cohen:

This project really began 25 years ago, when my husband, Joshua Cohen, first shared the story of Gilgamesh with me, as something he thought I might love too.  There was something about the story even then that drew me to explore its meaning through art.  I did a small relief in clay of the wrestling scene as a birthday present for Josh.  When a dear friend suggested I try creating a story in appliqué, there was no question as to “which story.”

I quite clearly remember the first pencil diagram/sketch created in January 2013.  The two end panels were to represent the two stone tablets wherein Gilgamesh “wrote the story” on his return.  I very much wanted the ideas of “journey,” “possibility,” and “change” to be represented which led to the diagonal panel in the center.  Even the idea for the border was there at the beginning — wanting it to be the edge of the lapis lazuli stone of the tablets. The other element that was present from the beginning was the idea of a circular story.  The actual text begins with a description of the final panel, which is repeated and elaborated on at the end — but is it really circular?  Is the place reached at the end, while called the same, still the same “Uruk,” still the same “Gilgamesh?” My interpretation is in the quilt.

As with any project of such length and size, there are so many people to thank for their contributions.  My husband lent his creative imagination to design of many of the fantastic elements (the meteor, the scorpion beings, and all the characters, to name a few).  My daughter, Leah, became my steadfast and honest critic and support.  Her eye for color and detail grew and developed along with the quilt.  Her unending positive and loving support was everything.  My son, Avi, reluctantly served as model for some of the characters (thank you!), and added some significant suggestions that really completed the final panel.  Other inspiration came from a Hubble telescope photograph of the double galaxy, M.C. Escher’s early work with perspective and point-of-view, and all the unnamed and unknown sources of the hundreds of fabric designs, and other materials. And, of course, to David Ferry for his wonderful verse rendering of such a powerful story. My thanks and gratitude to all.

 

Marianne Moore: Nevertheless

Marianne Moore, “Nevertheless” (San Francisco Musuem of Art, October 18, 1957)

you’ve seen a strawberry
that’s had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds – the fruit
within the fruit – locked in
like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant –
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can’t

harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear –

leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;

as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram’s-horn root some-
times. Victory won’t come

to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times – so
the bound twig that’s under-
gone and over-gone, can’t stir.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!

A Poem I Love: Debra San

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1896), Complete Poems, 1924, XXXIII

Writes Professor Emerita Debra San:

Sometimes life’s burdens and obligations, even the presence of other
people, weigh too heavily on us, and how pleasant it is to fantasize
being free of all that, free to just wander along without a care in the
world, like Dickinson’s happy little stone. It lives its life “in casual
simplicity,” and so does the form of the poem itself, with its rhymes in
couplets and its lines short. It’s a marriage of form and content. But,
as always with Dickinson, there’s a hint of something disturbing under
the surface. The stone is happy because it’s free of burdens, but only
as the result of unknowingly complying with “absolute decree,” the
inviolable will of nature or the deity. Are we as humans also fulfilling
“absolute decree”? Would we be willing to sacrifice free will to
experience the happiness of the little stone?  What seems so casually
simple may not be so simple after all.