A carpet was the topic of an inspired conversation this week. It lies on my living room floor (above) and sometimes visitors will pause and stare into the thing. It is a curious creation that emits a strange power. This carpet, or Gabbeh to be more precise, is of an indeterminate age and originally harks from an Iranian village. I know this because I found a little piece of material sewn onto the back of the thing that explained it so.
The carpet found me ten years ago. It materialized one rainy afternoon with a boyfriend who, soon after meeting me, decided to move back to the States. He proceeded to offload most of his possessions into my brand new flat in Soho, Hong Kong - and this delightful item was amid the second elevator-load.
The carpet found me ten years ago. It materialized one rainy afternoon with a boyfriend who, soon after meeting me, decided to move back to the States. He proceeded to offload most of his possessions into my brand new flat in Soho, Hong Kong - and this delightful item was amid the second elevator-load.
Over the years since, I have grown to love this carpet and it has loved me back. It has followed me through several new homes, and then was curled up and placed in a container and sailed all the way from the South China Sea to Boston, and then in a truck up to Maine where it now lives in a 100-year old house in the West End of Portland. It provides soft relief to the feet of both myself and my husband... and it provides entertainment. We have spent hours sitting and looking at the wierd elements to this piece of art. Some curious mistakes that have made their way into the weaving, such as headless men (below) and three-legged camels.
We decided it must have been some kind of training carpet.
But then, the other day I was on Skype and talking to my aunt, Anna O'Higgins, a wonderfully-inspired artist who lives in an ancient house on the island of Anglesey in North Wales and makes art from silk and glass.
Her eyes were lingering on the screen, staring somewhere beyond me until she cried out, 'Oooh, love the rug!' I commenced to explain the wierd qualities of this carpet, and she corrected me. 'No, the mistakes are meant to be there,' she assured me. 'Islamic art cannot be perfect, only Allah is perfect. So artists will add the mistakes.' She adds with a laugh, 'It's a philosophy I've been using myself lately.'
At this point in the conversation, some kind of light bulb illuminates my mind. Or perhaps a better explanation would be to say that a gate swings open and an exotic wild animal (maybe some kind of fantastical peacock) comes hurtling out and runs down the hillside of my consciousness. Something quite literally shifts in me and releases its energy.
The following day, I sit down with all my notebooks and start to really work on my book of stories, for the first time in months. I feel released, unshackled. You see, I've been keeping this wild animal, my muse, in a small cage of late. I've been visiting her with cups of tea every few days and informing her that she needs to be perfect. But with every visit, I have become increasingly exasperated to see her standing limply in the corner, unwilling to move.
Something about that line, about an artist purposefully injecting a mistake into her art... it clicked that gate wide open and set something free. What a relief, to not need to be perfect. It made me think of Leonard Cohen's 'Anthem':
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in...
Perhaps it's that glint of imperfection that is actually the route in.
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