Burning Your Boats 精彩片段：
The Quilt Maker-1
One theory is, we make our destinies like blind men chucking paint at a wall; we never understand nor even see the marks we leave behind us. But not too much of the grandly accidental abstract expressionist about my life, I trust; oh, no. I always try to live on the best possible terms with my unconscious and let my right hand know what my left is doing and, fresh every morning, scrutinise my dreams. Abandon, therefore, or rather, deconstruct the blind-action painter metaphor; take it apart, formalise it, put it back together again, strive for something a touch more hard-edged, intentional, altogether less arty, for I do believe we all have the right to choose.
In patchwork, a neglected household art neglected, obviously, because my sex excelled in it -- well, there you are; thats the way its been, isnt it? Not that I have anything against fine art, mind; nevertheless, it took a hundred years for fine artists to catch up with the kind of brilliant abstraction that any ordinary housewife used to be able to put together in only a year, five years, ten years, without making a song and dance about it.
However, in patchwork, an infinitely flexible yet harmonious overall design is kept in the head and worked out in whatever material happens to turn up in the ragbag: party frocks, sackcloth, pieces of wedding-dress, of shroud, of bandage, dress shirts etc. Things that have been worn out or torn, remnants, bits and pieces left over from making blouses. One may appliqué upon ones patchwork birds, fruit and flowers that have been clipped out of glazed chintz left over from covering armchairs or making curtains, and do all manner of things with this and that.
The final design is indeed modified by the availability of materials; but not, necessarily, much.
For the paper patterns from which she snipped out regular rectangles and hexagons of cloth, the thrifty housewife often used up old love letters.
With all patchwork, you must start in the middle and work outward, even on the kind they call "crazy patchwork", which is made by feather-stitching together arbitrary shapes scissored out at the makers whim.
Patience is a great quality in the maker of patchwork.
The more I think about it, the more I like this metaphor. You can really make this image work for its living; it synthesises perfectly both the miscellany of experience and the use we make of it.
Born and bred as I was in the Protestant north working-class tradition, I am also pleased with the metaphors overtones of thrift and hard work.
Patchwork. Good.
Somewhere along my thirtieth year to heaven -- a decade ago now I was in the Greyhound Bus Station in Houston, Texas, with a man I was then married to. He gave me an American coin of small denomination (he used to carry about all our money for us because he did not trust me with it). Individual compartments in a large vending machine in this bus station contained various cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, biscuits and candy bars. There was a compartment with two peaches in it, rough-cheeked Dixie Reds that looked like Victorian pincushions. One peach was big. The other peach was small. I conscientiously selected the smaller peach.
"Why did you do that?" asked the man to whom I was married.
"Somebody else might want the big peach," I said.
"Whats that to you?" he said.