Mother of Carpets, Mother of Snakes

Dear Friends,

In the season of visiting with relatives I am visiting and revisiting my ghosts and presences. Here are two more brief tales of the mother—I find that with each story we simultaneously grow closer and become separate.

You can find the first installment here.

— Sal

Postscript: It’s not too late to join in my festival of thanking. I’m taking requests until the end of November. Info in the link below.

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Carpet Mother

The mother said open the curtain, so the hand rose from an adjacent couch and shifted the curtain right.

Too much.

The hand shifted it left.

No, no.

The hand shifted it right, and then left, and then right again, twitch by twitch.

The curtain was wool, though we were in the tropics, the subtropics, to be more accurate. Its panels were attached to the rod with hidden metal hooks. It was tasteful. Sand-colored. Nubbly.

The carpet was wool too, and white. It had come from New York and had been taken up and reinstalled each time the mother moved—six, perhaps seven times since it was shipped to the island. Now, the carpet had lain in one place for several years. Its final place, its place of rest. It was old, it was stained, it was a shrinking rectangle cut down from something vast.

There are legends in several cultures that you can be trapped by a carpet if no flaws have been woven in. Every white wall, wall to wall, every white sky. Even wind blowing through has a kind of whiteness to it, a kind of carpet in its mind.

Yesterday the Hand arranged green stems and marigolds in a blue vase. The stems weren’t long enough so the hand married two with a rubber band. The clover did not bend the way it should. One stem was meant to be heaven, one was meant to be human, and the hand didn’t remember what the third was supposed to represent, the orange marigold.

The carpet represented beauty, it represented wealth and investment, long after it had traveled far from those who would have understood its message. The carpet, like this page, had a single reader.

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Snake Mother

First (although this should be obvious), never look into the eyes of the mother. It is also best not to fall under her gaze, though clearly it is possible to survive it or these fingers would not be typing.

What is it about the eye, like the camera, like the void? As Bodhidharma said, “vast emptiness, nothing holy.” This is where we dwell, by other terms, this is reality.

Inside the camera is the seeingness we fear, I fear. Simply: the capacity to see.

It is best to present a simulacrum. At the time, I wore the selected garments, sometimes dresses.

We lived on an island where there were no snakes. All of the snakes were in my mind. All of the snakes had been seen by cameras.

What this story needs is a story, I tell myself, but I don’t know what a story is. The queen died of grief. Baby shoes. Scheherazade.

I was in Berlin the day David Bowie died, and the next morning his face was on every newspaper. I was already dying of grief when it happened. The hero’s journey, the dark night, the sea change rich and strange.

Turn to face the strange said my keychain, the one that held the keys to my new life.

Maybe I would be better off looking into the camera, looking straight into the eyes and letting myself turn to stone. Stone is just sleep, and the mountains are walking.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts and your stories.

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It’s not too late to join in my festival of thanking, where I thank you, readers and subscribers. Just try to put in your requests before the end of the month.