I think of a ripe, full space, where material overwhelms, so much that when you enter you get lost in the tangle of already-there relationality between things. I think first of a wet jungle and then of a cluttered home and so next of my uncle’s funny husband, who keeps cockatoos in big cages in their tiny apartment that’s stuffed with the webbing of two humans and a fluffed up cat and an irregular dog and couches covered in hair and feathers and crumbs, an apartment that is always just filled-up way too much. To be a guest among all this stuff is to concede you’re something very little, incapable of organization.
Everyone can’t believe how annoying husband is for forcing beloved uncle into the constant screeing world of the birds and making this small space so permanently un-hushed. Husband has soft hair just like a cockatoos top and he’ll sit for hours tickling them with his fingernails and fashioning strange jungle gyms of little bright colored sticks and gluing mirrors to the walls and getting a brand new bird whenever one dies which is all the time.
Uncle is a quiltmaker who is only tactile always and exudes a heavy quiet as he fashions strings and shapes into beautiful patterns that we all want for ourselves and will sometimes get for birthdays. So we celebrate a few times each year uncle look at this wonderful behavior of your hands and look at the way you so beautifully dance in the stitches and look at how sweetly you have transformed all this useless material into something I can cuddle underneath.
In touching one of his quilts you come into quick contact with his obsessive labor, so visible in the stitching and the tedious arrangement of shapes. You can sense his toils with the fabric, each piece of unknown origin and different density, each having had a multitude of forms and each woven by labor in its own way from all the singularities and component parts comprising. You could maybe envision each string and the weaving apparatus it was entrails to, and also the room this machine sat in, and the people operating it, and maybe the lunch they held in their weaving bodies, or was there an anger in the gut that made the strings fray, or was it the time of day that the shift was almost over or was seven hours away, and wait who were the dyers of the string before it came into this room? Were their hands soaked or pulsing with rhythm or was there a bereavement felt that turned the string dark blue? And what crushed plants made that pigment, and what about the bowls and pestles and fibers and silkworms or cotton stalks or shorn lambs or so what of all all all the materiality within this one quilt that uncle has assembled into a birthday present that talks to me of the way his hands move.
Husband makes nothing from his birds that we can touch as a final product of human-material synthesis, only noise and emails reporting recurrent bird-death, and these fluorescent cages like tiny psychedelic dollhouses made up of a drawn-out sense of longing for the birds to live in apartments gorged full just like his. This makes him mysterious and weird and the family whispers about it. Is he bird-like? Has he always been? Or did he start to adopt that upward swoosh in the top of his hair gradually to look more cockatoo? He should get another hobby, find a purpose. How could uncle stand it, all those bird feathers in the air and seed on the ground and chirping calls through the space. What a wonder he was able to assemble quilts so neat and tight in a place of so much other loose-floating materiality.
I’ll say it’s everything about this place that it’s filled with fabric stuff and bird stuff and quiet quilty-soft uncle and goofy birdy-husband who hates to leave and sinks deep in the wettened crater of his chair by the cages. And it’s something that he crumples uncle’s quilts under his body so long and heavy that they take the form of his creases. And it’s something that uncle doesn’t ever really touch the birds, just brushes their feathers off of his stuff again and again. And so within all this shared tangle the two boogie around the apartment with their fingers doing such different things to find paths through the materials and each of them is so deeply defined by what they touch.
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