Radish Heart- On making things that comfort and disrupt

I have recently been obsessed with a fiber artist who crafts vintage corner store staples like hostess donuts and cheez-its, so this weekend when my daughter and I took a needle-felting workshop at our favorite art center, Quarry, I assumed I’d make something food related- Pop Tarts, a jar of Fluff, maybe even a Slim Jim.

And yet once the delicate little stabby needles had been passed around and I saw the bright red tufts of wool, I jumped into auto-pilot and started making what I always do, stabbing away until a tuberous toothy radish flourished, not completely unlike a tampon, in my hands.

Why radish, you might ask? Why not the iconic cabbage, which has the titillating biography of being carried around in Patricia Highsmith’s handbag, studded with a menagerie of her beloved pet snails, and brought to literary parties? Why not the adorable brussel sprout or a clam or Fig Newton? (All excellent felting ideas).

I don’t know, and that is exactly the point. I believe in the power of the mundane. And the power of unexamined interests. The radish delights me, and how lovely is it to make something because it makes you happy? Not to understand it, but to find a gentle and cozy flank upon which to turn off your brain?

We saw A Complete Unknown today, and I cried through a lot of it, and afterward felt comforted but also haunted by the portrayal of Baez, who at one point makes coffee, looking sexy in Bob Dylan’s kitchenette, in her undies, like Jen Aniston in Along Came Polly. She is shown singing with all the pathos of a modern pop star puffy and laminate with filler. Her voice in the movie is flawless bland and pretty. The actress is flawless bland and pretty. And this felt like the ultimate betrayal.

Artists like Dylan and Baez are not beautiful; they are made grotesque by their talent. If you watch old recordings of Baez singing, she does not look calm or placid. You see agony and neurosis behind her eyes, and the strength that it takes, the fucking musculature and ungodly trust, to ascend the octaves the way she does, defying gravity. Sopranos are not delicate, they are ruthless.

But what made me the most sad was seeing/remembering clearly, in the margins of the film, how women like Baez are deprived of mentorship and lineage. The most moving scenes are the ones where a dying Woody Guthrie passes the torch literally in the form of his harmonica. Who does Joan Baez receive her torch from? We are always being airbrushed, erased. We have to fight to learn our lineage.

While felting at the table, surrounded by women of all ages, my daughter said “this is violent and soothing” and we all laughed and agreed. And later that night I thought about how Trump is coming into power again tomorrow. And I thought about how the things passed down to me from women are sacred. I thought about the violent and soothing work of making something to comfort and astonish. How generations of women before us have sat in circles making things with their hands while they figure out what they will do next.

I lied about not knowing.

The first thing I ever planted with my daughter was radishes. When she pulled it out of the earth I witnessed her feral delight. Radish heart like a wart, a bulbous throb, a neon note, Joan Baez swooning upward. It was joyful. And it was violent. To pull something out of the dark that you made, now in the stinging light of day made plain and clear.

I don’t know what I will make. I know that the making is the point. The repetition of the work, letting what needs to come out of us, meaningful or not, take form.

And I know that in these handcrafts, revolutions are made. People said Joan Baez had a pretty voice. They didn’t realize how violent that kind of soothing can be.

If you’re still reading this, I love you. We will make it through what comes next.

https://www.penfelt.com/about-lebrie-rich

https://granta.com/three-poems-ruefle/