This Recording

Macramé/Macabre: The Afternoons of Ursula Gullow

by Jaye Bartell

The epic experience of everyday life is what I’m most interested in depicting through my paintings; how special is a moment that might go unnoticed; how bizarre and surreal some things are that we’ve adapted into our psyches as normal. My chosen subject matter tends to be animals, people, cities, landscapes, and mild social fiascos with nostalgic undertones. I am influenced by dreams for their nonlinear quality; shadows because they are definite but obscure; old photographs for history, and children for their wicked naivete. I like to paint decay and cheer simultaneously, narrate caution, and represent beauty. While the imagery of each painting may differ, the underlying sentiment is always the same. –Ursula Gullow, on her work. 

Wilting leaves, lilting woven little pictures. Faces of stacked expressions, the edges of difference smoothed to fuse the mounting into one fat cheek. Several intervals cohere in an instant of pause. Afternoons foremost of pleasure, and come unbidden, granted. If in the air a bird, on the ground there is a rat; if on the ground a cleft of mud, in the sky a cloud plump and weightless. Saint Marguerite and the butterflies, Proteus and the dandelion, there are others, are friends, to be with, with whom to be, “feather to feather, added” feather by feather lost. A creaking door and a spear of grass breaking.

“Don’t Stop” — Fleetwood Mac

Afternoons of haunted pleasure, buckets and pails, bottles and cans, fairies and eagles, duality a matter of facets. Twilight, dawn, change, instant of, both, at once. Within the area of gray crisis, a smear of brightness, and neither is to be seen as nobler, nor merited. Hymns remembered, hymns recast. There is a particular time of afternoon in which these paintings occur, from which they derive, laying blunt all edges of distinction, when in the air motes of dust and seeds carried by whiskers coast upon the softened air. Or else it’s later morning; any of the instances of change from one phase of day or night to the other, a concurrent finality and initiation, at once old and young. Whimsy is not naiveté: long durations of withholding, the tension of held breath, unreels into dance, and gasps song. Experience and its purported wisdom render small the clothes of children, but to wear them again is not perversion. Generic reverence for age is as mythical as the contempt for youth, or that age by the fact of itself knows more, and childhood by that knows less. Worse perhaps is the fantasy of innocence, that children are congenitally sages, incapable of the cruelty, the fact of will, that defines maturity. If any aspect of children is decidedly unique it’s the absence of self-consciousness, which is often self-construction, onto self-defense, isolation, and finally, the unflagging blinders of “understanding the world,” such conceptions that dismiss enigma, mystery, ignoring the little grin on the face of worms, fiddles in the branches of trees, tea with butterflies, adventure!   The insistence finally is wonder, wonderment, the wonder of the real, that a world seen dimly, is a world dimly seen, never for the pallor of the actual, intiricate crisis, the vast duality, twined, that explodes continually in whirling order.

Children in jackets with hoods lined with wool stand before a horde of worms. One comes forward away from the others and the boy unperturbed, leans down, unconcerned with malevolence, terms of repulsion or hygiene. Back of him, white clean emanation, rises of green, origins of order and protection, bars on windows and brooms for the floors.

It is winter, but early or late in the season, the bugs assembled to corroborate warmth, or gather in a final stage of dispersion. Emerging from grime, dim of color, unclean, all but one a worm, caterpillar—the disparate ant vulnerable among them, if he will be seized, if he will be vaulted, exalted, taken into the fold, or devoured. Before one another, the boy and girl, and the caterpillars and the other, they are not yet embattled. Not knowing friend from hostility, the step next to come could preclude amity, make bolder the colors of origin, sharpen the white against the mud, incite invasion, inundation.

There was an instant he could have left the side of his sister and the conditions of their young life in their family and household—a worm of commerce, a wriggling key to a door of the fundament, a gate not the last confronted, but one determinate, of gates later to come.

A dream I had myself when young of being absconded by insects, and was taken with little resistance, into where they came from, which further details I can’t recall, but can right now sense a worm in my own stomach, slipping upward, that to speak of them it must be in their form, worms, worms, the content of my narration. 

It could be the caterpillar is dead already, and all parties come upon it interested or aggrieved, the ant bullying through the kindred others to rob the bounty for itself and brethren. Try though to look upon the instance presented, “Caterpillar Outlaw,” the perspective at once aerial and direct, without the trappings familiar, warfare, commerce, childhood, vermin, aggression, boundary the threshold, which the one caterpillar has crossed, an indefinite swath of aggregate colors, before danger or safety, profundity, profanity, duality, polarity, the mind of a child, the trail in the dust from a worm, the face of the small girl liminal, turning from one to another, from distraction to worry, from deference to command, curiosity to terror. Worse than the lepers sores is your disgust.

“Big Love” — Fleetwood Mac

Affections transgressing, the territory of belief expanded allows entrance for that which is not in the air. She holds the company of lambs and is not sentimental. They come to one another because the day is warm and the grass, when long, cool to lie in. She has heard of the sainted, the knighted, and those espoused by the laurelled who with sticks of proud enamel put forth praise. She knows also the defamed, those for whom the brittle wood puts forth excoriation. There are some forged of both molds, the golden and the ragged, and they come to her with instruments of music and of mystic instruction. They play for her because she hears, teach her because there is correspondence free of heroism or obsessive singularity, “Regarding the Girl as Visionary,” she can see, and will see, and does see, the coloration, the magnetism between the mind of hallowed volition and the halo that circulates above, keeping vivid the spinning, electric the turning, her eyes ringed with the gold that gilds the crowns of the wisest nymphs and satyrs, who in their freedom have lain in the cool wet folds of the smile of the lamb, who have sat beneath orbs of dew and held them until morning opened the mouths of the sleeping reeds, the grass of the field where she comes to sit and form clouds of heat and early evening, clouds of lamb’s hair and the twine of the satyr’s bow, O! shadow the ravaged and rain upon that which suffers, under dirt, in dryness! What is holy shall be determined by that which we look upon with holiness. The hands that would play notes upon the satyrs little fiddle must likewise be small if the air is to shimmer.

Come dogs paws and crackles through wires, the feet upon the floor slanted, arch of memory, hear from the realm of yellowed hue, where walk the mutts, where walk the dear, old dogs. Dance! Dance now! for there will come the return when you must walk again with the dogs. I’d wanted to grow, to go where I told myself was best, where if there was sun it came kindly, and all upon me, that the flesh I was first granted take color of what I lived under, among, that which I lived among. Going on, the dryness incessant has with it such instants of flooding that my memory too is washed each time, the aridity I  fear will subsume my hardiest resistance has been abided, abated, has subsided. There are claws I hear grating upon a firm surface, the noise of threat coming toward me. It is me maintains the correspondence, me who calls the dog by its hydra-head of many names, Ol’ Girl, old girl, my dog, my man, good friend, come and do not go to where it is not here. When the music’s end stops dancing, return to hear the braying without dread.

“Dreams” — Fleetwood Mac

But the night’s furor is not ultimate, and there comes after, after, a morning to wake to, to walk into, through the large doors, down the several stairs, onto the paths concrete, trees overhanging, daisy smell of May 31^st, trucks delivering, the children behind a fence at play, and all company comes flying in, their wings give slight breeze. See the cat on the roof under a window where a dog inside sits, envious but comfortable, invite them to breakfast, there is a pot of tea with dew on its porcelain underside, the cups warmed by summer. Oblations in winter, when frost makes edges in the air, elms give no protection, boughs host crackles, ravens of leaves, it seems the prayers are all for naught, and pledged in fear that warmth will not again come, again. There will come a morning of relief, the poverty of too few dry potatoes and the loneliness of frozen pipes are of a condition only distantly imaginable. Lay the cloth on the table, pink with the leaking of beets wet underground, don a common gown, let the hair rest on the brow, call on the small friends that ease time, see in their patient faces what was feared lost, all succor now delivered, and nothing from anguished labor, nothing but that which has come of its own season.

“Landslide” — Fleetwood Mac 

The grass, upon, is where we live, and walking, upon, will not offend its situation. O for the kindness of being known, integral association, repair, respite, all around, and closely, bees returning, beneficent, their barbs retained, propilus to drop in each glass, have a cup of tea, whatever smolders can cool and wait. Sparrows layer nests with salvaged garbage, see the one with dappled brown head carry a strand of tissue in her beak, from the concrete up through lane of oaks, to the eaves croft above the gutter elbow, wave, rippling banner, pennant of morning not new but renewed. From afar the beetles in dung laugh at the rites of friends, but coming nearer they too have their inclusion, and are cleaned of their labors. Settle the roughened blood, schema of wars. Dust from grinding teeth, left in last night, when paranoia made the door tremble in its frame, and the moon’s aural puddle an orange psychosis. There is nothing quaint about the hard-earned ease of gathering for no reason. Only those whose tongues have withered in disuse, whose eyes have wept piss, who have sunken out of place from their own body, crawled behind the wall to scratch and menace the dispirited husk crumpled in the chair, who have spit in the communal wine, sequestered, self-hating quarantine, only they can walk the peaceable morning, make company of those present, speak to feed pigeons, look on with eyes dried not hardened, pour the tea as tonic for the hangover of enmity, brittle aging, be again a kid at the table, in a common gown, unembarrassed.

Let us go then / you and I, make untrue what was earlier said, it is now and not evening, our cars are mutually pink, the heels of our shoes lift us higher, and holding your hands, my hands are held, I want to go for longer than a visit where the sun will make glow the mulberry tree which we’ll dance around until the apocalypse doesn’t come and the bridges don’t fall, but maintain stance above the river, and our cares will drop over the cabled side, down to assume the blue of the water, and raise its blue to the sky now clearing of fog. I want to be your sister in ridiculous clothes! Faces of affection make tender the ground underfoot, and woodpeckers with plumes of red hair on their heads, our heels will tap pitch from the stubborn earth—jar the secretion, put it on the dash, the sun as we go southward will mellow the sap, and we’ll have syrup for our pancakes that we’ll eat when we arrive. The interval between our embrace, though close, shows years of mowed grass and often fallow gardens, children defected and gone, husbands who try no longer to thaw ice, and too many miles accrued. Our heads drawn back make two crests of a heart. Our two pink cars parked go almost red with eagerness, O! let us go then  / you and I  before the beasts of kudzu lower their shoulders, and Elvis Presley dies!

“Monday Morning” — Fleetwood Mac

Coda: Hymns, Recast

Who are these like stars appearing…We, if any, any one person Hark! the sound of holy voices, chanting in the crystal sea…Ships of comforted heart, tables of gracious friendship, Come to our poor nature’s night with thy blessed inward light…And candles of outward adoration go out, from gusts of struggle, dark, rankled and giving only phantom smoke. Who are these in bright array…It is as it was, and will be, us and nothing other, source and reception, beacon and beckoned, thirst and satiation. Let no hopeless tears be shed…But weeping the eyes turn from hardness, fixated desperate for a light that comes from behind the gaze, if from anywhere, behind the gaze. Safely, safely gathered in…Women and Men, dirt upon your hearts and hems, come Safe upon the billow deep…the imagination of eons of legitimate heaven. The strain upraise of joy and praise…Hoarse and tremulous, the throat that wants song will sing, First let the birds with painted plumage gay…To ourselves soon to become alike, Ye clouds that onward sweep…It is below, upon, where glory lies, if ever above Ye winds on pinions sleep…Circulate prayers of daily breath Ye days of cloudless beauty, hoarfrost and summer glow…The mystery is ours on earth and cyclical Ye groves that wave in spring…Reeds O marshes of mind, thoughts fill the bog with waking, And glorious forests sing…Restore plurality to holy definition, multiplicity to god’s name and nature, nothing solemn that is not whimsical, nothing that is one that is not at once another one, if upward, then down also, if broken then firm, if ragged then graceful, if mighty then pathetic, if with all united, then at once from all forlorn, if silent then bellowing proudly a god Ye thunders, echoing loud and deep, a child who neither knows nor cares for majesty beyond the underside of grass underground…

Jaye Bartell is a writer living in Buffalo, New York.

“Sarah” — Fleetwood Mac