Malleable Forms: Selected Essays

By Meeka Walsh

For 30 years Meeka Walsh has been the Editor of the Canadian art magazine, Border Crossings. A selection of her much-admired essays published in each issue of that magazine have been selected for this substantial book. Malleable Forms is a book of 47 essays, rich and broad in ideas and subjects as far-ranging as art, architecture, literature, family, place, dogs, spirituality, birds, rabbits, and whimsy. But it isn’t just about the subjects presented in the essays but the way in which Walsh has made connections inside the essays. “Kim Gordon: Star Turns” examines the memoir of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon takes the reader on a trip that includes surprising links between Gordon and Ab Ex painter Robert Motherwell. “Rilke: Speaking Longing” measures the poetic sensibilities of Rainer Maria Rilke, Cynthia Ozick, and Vladimir Nabokov. “Say Bird: A Consideration of Interspecies Romance” describes the romantic tale of a courtship between a woman and a blue jay. Noted international critic and art writer, Barry Schwabsky, has written an introductory essay. The persistent engagement of memory winds through the book and resonant is EM Forster’s dictum, “Only connect.” Walsh makes her particular kind of connections throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781927886618

Book preview

Cover: Malleable Forms by Meeka WalshTitle Page: Malleable Forms Selected Essays by Meeka Walsh Introduction by Barry Schwabsky ARP Books | Winnipeg

Copyright © 2022 Meeka Walsh

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This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.

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ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Sport, Culture and Heritage.

The essays in this volume were first published in Border Crossings magazine, and are included here courtesy of the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Border Crossings, Meeka Walsh and Robert Enright fonds,

MSS

520.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Malleable forms : selected essays / by Meeka Walsh.

Other titles: Essays. Selections

Names: Walsh, Meeka, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220080186 | Canadiana

(ebook) 20220080194 |

ISBN

9781927886601 (softcover) |

ISBN

9781927886618 (ebook)

Subjects:

LCGFT

: Essays.

Classification:

LCC

PS

8595.

A

588

A

6 2022 |

DDC

C

814/.54—dc23

This book is for Joe and Elvira and Hazel.

Contents

Introduction

The Woman Who Watched a Stone Grow

by Barry Schwabsky

The Subject Is Home

Dream City Shimmering

A Pale Nimbus of Melancholy

Severed Lines

Memory, a Moth

Knitting to the Close

Out of Place

The Subject Is Writing

A Mother’s Story, for Brief Moments, in Dreams: The Problems of Language

Gertrude Stein’s Dog

Singing the Rapturous Self

Life Is Puzzling

Georges Perec: Soft Chalk and Pigeons

Werner Herzog: Waying Mythologies

Fleur Jaeggy’s Gift of Detachment

The Heart of Absence: Patrick Modiano

Rilke: Speak, Longing

Through the Eyes of Another: Black and Visible

Uneasy Bridges to Writing a Fine Madness: Helen DeWitt and Robert Walser

Clarice Lispector: The Thereness of Language

Women

Kim Gordon: Star Turns

She Is Not Amused

Claude Cahun: Travelling in the Prow of Herself

Dangerous Persuasions

Subjectivities: Three Women

Nancy Spero: Grit and Grace

The Ineffable

A Moral Place in the World

Time Balm

Nostalgia for the Present: Max Blecher

Behind Our Eyelids, Dreaming

Trust Accounts

Bas Jan Ader: Quicksilver and Gone

Spiritualisme: Hilma af Klint, Paul Klee, Kai Althoff

Photography

Out of Ink Blackness

Slowly, from the Moon

My Dad and His Buddies: A Photograph

Dreaming Robert Frank, Dreaming Walter Benjamin

The Subject Is Architecture

Measurement and the Missing Subject

A Handle, on Building

Architectures of Domesticity

Light’s Shadow

The Subject Is Art

Caravaggio: The Desired Body Flares Like an Apparition

The Gaze and the Guess: Fixing Identity in Étant donnés

Time and Paint

Picasso’s Guernica, Walter Benjamin, War and Peace

What’s Up, Doc?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing About Art

Parables

The Woman Who Ate Money: A Parable for Our Times

Say, Bird: A Consideration of Interspecies Romance

Acknowledgements

The Woman Who Watched a Stone Grow

by Barry Schwabsky

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, wrote Joseph Conrad, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious. There’s something a little sophistical in that statement—after all, doesn’t every human being, even the most curious of all, remain partly mysterious? But there’s a truth in it, too, namely in the idea that one reveals oneself—that is, discloses rather than solves one’s mysteries—not through the assertion of the ego but through the questions one asks of the world around. In writing about figures as different as Clarice Lispector and Kim Gordon, I notice, Meeka Walsh explicitly links qualities of curiosity and generosity. I might say the same of her.

I’ve been acquainted with Walsh for a number of years, but it’s only since reading the essays in this book that I feel I’ve come to know her—that she’s revealed some of her mysteries to me. That’s not because she’s the kind of essayist who makes herself her main subject matter, or whose style is constantly yelling or whispering, Look at me! Look at me! She looks, she says, for an indication that the writer is present in the work. I am less interested in his art writing when he is its subject. But while Walsh does not put herself in place of the subject, she is always somewhere close by. I know she’s there because, in reading, I get a sense of the range of her curiosities and of their depth and character. Her book opens with its most autobiographical essays, but even those are hardly about self in the usual sense; they are about memories, perceptions, and above all about the use of reading to make sense of things—and in that sense they look through the self, if you see what I mean, to grasp whatever it is outside the self that the self wants to know. For Walsh, an observation such as I don’t remember being hungry is a clue, not so much to her personal past, to a former state of her own being, as to the otherwise possibly unverifiable suspicion that the local grocery store supplied the kinds of things that, as a little girl, she liked to eat; it’s a way of grasping a fact about the world around her through her relation to it.

Curiosity has led Meeka Walsh to wonder about things that no one else may ever have considered:

She wonders how the French aphorist Joseph Joubert would feel about the city of Winnipeg. (She does not need to wonder about Georges Perec, who, she knows, could have been a prairie dweller.)

She wonders why a woman (her mother) whose character unsuits her to the craft of knitting and who moreover has no particular need of the things she knits would nonetheless practise this art.

She wonders about the inner space from which people extract art, noticing that like the objective empirical space within which they produce it, it requires dimension, heat, and connectivity.

She wonders whether, in a time where the ideas of soul or spirit, however widespread, have become devalued, the apparently less exalted one of magic might (excuse the pun) do the trick, making for distraction or alternately for enchantment; she observes that even the most spiritual of artists produce things that may seem even to themselves like the endless silk scarves pulled from a magician’s sleeve.

And Walsh has noticed so many things. Among these are thoughts that others have entertained before, even articulated, but that have not been given sufficient consideration. She doesn’t make a big deal about it. It’s up to you to take the cue from her noticing, once you’ve let it sink in, to do some noticing of your own. For instance:

She points us to Primo Levi’s extraordinary perception that writing may betray the task of the witness precisely by rendering the true story more convincing and more compelling. The warning is not that writing will fail to convey the truth but that it will convey too much of it, because writing tends to dramatize the sometimes terrible but often undramatic realities it conveys. As Walsh says elsewhere, in writing there is always the danger of artifice.

She notices that self-doubt means you psychically pat yourself down to reassure yourself of your physical reality. A statement like that makes me feel like she’s seen me in some of my most mortifying moments.

She quotes without comment the rarely spoken truth (here posited by Pierre Mac Orlan with regard to Claude Cahun) that in certain artists or writers the reader or viewer relishes a state of torment so richly productive that one should not wish her rid of it. She neither interrogates the ethics of this pleasure nor lets us ignore it.

She notices that no one writes while asleep. Does this seem too evident to bother pointing out? Think again: ask yourself why, if people can talk while they sleep, if they can walk while they sleep, then why not …?

She understands the photograph as a riddle, so elusive it can’t ever be held fast or pinned down, and so powerful it can reverse the course of history. It’s just like a thought, isn’t it?

She notices how perfumes chemically sourced have a sharp, alert quality that natural florals don’t. To me it’s a revelation, yet one that makes immediate sense, that a scent may be alert, on the qui vive—that it might be sniffing me out rather than vice versa.

She knows that even if—as it’s often said—a map can never become identical with the territory it represents, a territory may devolve into the mere map of itself, in which case even tall pines may function as nothing more than giant map pins holding the land in place.

And she has noticed things that others might have been too timid to notice:

She is willing to notice that a book of whose greatness she is well aware, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, is a soporific—not in a bad way, mind you, but because of the trust its voice inspires as it carries the reader along as if in a dream; but even so, who else would have been willing to say so? It might sound inappropriate. Walsh couldn’t care less because she’s confident of the accuracy of her perception. But how acutely awake do we have to be? she asks elsewhere. I mean, is it necessary to be vigilantly attentive to the exterior world or can we sometimes let it just sift and filter in?

She has watched a stone grow.

Something that goes along with the many particular things Walsh has noticed is her understanding of how distinct and seemingly unrelated things belong together, become mutually illuminating in each other’s proximity; especially books on disparate topics. (These are not mainly essays in literary criticism, but they are mainly occasioned by reading; they use books to understand the world more than to understand books.) How many people have read Italo Calvino in tandem with Frank O’Hara, or Helen DeWitt in tandem with Robert Walser? Or Abraham Joshua Heschel, first with Anna Akhmatova, then with Bas Jan Ader? And more than that:

She knows that Peter Zumthor understands a door handle very differently from how Ludwig Wittgenstein did.

She shines the light from a rumination on bachelorhood from Kafka’s diaries on thesecret making of Marcel Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés, completed precisely during the years of marriage that followed decades of bachelorhood.

She sees how Robert Motherwell’s thoughts about the reason one pushes on as an artist, despite everything, illuminates the memoirs of Kim Gordon, who (by the way) doesn’t consider herself a musician but rather someone who loves making music.

Connections, seepages from one idea to another: Walsh pretends to organize the book into sections devoted to topics such as writing, art, home, women—but really, they are all one subject to her, one series of digressions from each into and out of the others; and finally one might decide that the one subject they are all about (and especially, almost by definition, if they don’t mention it) is the one that occupies what might be the centre of the book: the ineffable. She uses in one of these essays a beautiful circumlocution for what a more pedestrian writer might have simply called the arts: all the essential fields dealing with the ways people made contact with each other. Just so: people make contact thanks to the fact that all their ways of doing so, of communicating, make contact, touch each other, exchange properties.

That doesn’t mean that anything goes. There is an understated, indeed barely noticeable formality to Walsh’s language. This decorum forbids nothing from being said but wards off that excessive relaxation that might cause subtle but significant details to be overlooked or taken for granted. At the same time, she affects a form of familiarity that allows for assertions that would not be admitted to formal critical discourse. It’s a nice book, she writes of a certain edition of Benjamin’s writings, and somehow I imagine her handing me a slice of cake and a cup of tea as she says it, in the course of a comfortable but not effortless conversation we’re having as we try to get to know one another. (And she’s right about the book, by the way, I know it.) Benjamin, incidentally, seems to be Walsh’s most constant referent point. As wide-ranging as her European and North American cultural erudition may be—by contrast, she rarely alludes to writers, artists, or thinkers from beyond those realms—her true touchstones seem mainly to come from the German-speaking world: Benjamin, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald. (Only Roland Barthes comes close to being invoked as often.)

I believe it was Paul Klee (another German speaker) who spoke of drawing as taking a line for a walk. Was the implicit comparison to a dog? Anyone who’s taken a dog for a walk knows they have their own ideas about where they want to go. And to write an essay—an essay in the classic sense, that of Montaigne or Hazlitt—means to take a thought out for a walk. It gets interesting when you don’t know where it’s going—when it’s digressive, mercurial. Walsh writes essays that way. And if you want my advice: read them as digressively as they are written. No more than writing need reading follow a straight line. For as Walsh reminds us, and as Italo Calvino knew, digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. And why let the essay end? Even letters, she notes, become literature insofar as they require time. But these essays, which are literature, could also be letters—addressed to you, dear reader: subjective, of course; there’s no need to be equitable or even-handed, allowing the recipient to witness the writer in an almost dreamlike state … fill the burgeoning space of one page slipped behind the next with associative imagery. The words that come from this almost dreamlike state are as awake to the world as they can possibly be.

The Subject Is Home

Dream City Shimmering

On one trip to Paris, when the weather was fine, I rented a car so I could see the cathedral at Chartres independent of the pages of art books I’d studied. It was an easy drive of only ninety kilometres to the Beauce region—the granary of France—as the Michelin Guide coloured it. Like the prairies, a flat geography for planting and harvesting. Fields of yellow grain, a blue sky—so like home. And then there it was, rising, shimmering, lifting—an ascension in stone and filigree as Gothic cathedrals were intended. I’d forgotten it was built on a hill, not a big hill but elevated still, to loom and hover in just such a way so that it was improbable and dreamlike and, as you neared—massive and complex and weighted.

I approach Winnipeg from the north, driving on a highway whose elevation is so consistent you’d note with a start the vantage and view you had if the road rose by the thickness of a rural telephone book. It’s a terrain I find endlessly interesting, a landscape so subtle it seems, if the light is right, that each stalk and blade is visible and etched and each brave and single tree in a particular field remembered and remarked on if gone. On a flood plain washed regularly with the fertile slip of silt carried by the rivers on whose banks it sits is the city of Winnipeg, its buildings a mirage, a cluster, a huddle at the city’s centre and bolstered by others around this core—twelve, ten, eight storeys high, and each a significant vertical assertion on a horizontal plane. A chimera, an illusion, an idea of a city. A city of ideas, of imagination.

Paul Auster selected and translated a book of disconnected aphorisms, wisdom, ideas—the work of eighteenth-century French writer Joseph Joubert, who was a member of Diderot’s circle and who prepared, all his life, to write an important book by recording in notebooks his carefully wrought observations and considerations and never wrote the book. Auster’s introduction in The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert describes him as a man of letters without portfolio, a man who speaks in whispers and one must draw very close to hear what he is saying.¹ His work, finally, was the collection of notebooks in which he wrote daily for forty years and which, Joubert came to recognize, were the foundation of his writing and life.

This wonderfully eccentric, thoughtful individual would have found himself at home in Winnipeg, a city whose grain and meal are made from all the individuals who work collectively and nonetheless remain identifiably unique. Joseph Joubert, 1754–1824, in Winnipeg, an imagined city, dream city, city of ideas, 2008.

Joubert writes, A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball, reinforcing the conviction that this idea city is indeed here. If it’s a city of ideas, it’s a city of words, and from this mix we tell each other stories and construct a place in which we can live. On the topic of words Joubert notes, "The word clanger for sound answers that of splendor for light." Winnipeg has light in spades, in pails, in buckets and bowls, spilling over its barely cupped edges. We are awash in light here.

Locate for yourself this wide open city with no near big city, not for 800 kilometres. Joubert says, Thoughts … cannot survive the test of the open air and the air is sonorous, and sound is made of air, of air that is uttered, vibrant, shaped, articulated. The conversations we have among ourselves—for confirmation, for sparks, for solace and company; the words and ideas we send out across the distance, the peals of sound and hurrah that return to us. Joubert tests us, But the idea of the nest in the bird’s mind, where does it come from? We do what we do and draw on instinct and sensibility and whimsy. Last week my friends and I visited after dinner, and talk turned as it turns with friends, and sharing studios, offices, and apartments by affinity and need, all downtown in Winnipeg’s centre. We spoke about pigeons, who are our city neighbours, and their shallow purchase on the ledges of all the windows of the spaces we occupy, and how provisional their nests are, barely a twig cup to hold the eggs—a scant idea about a nest. Still, the pigeons wheel in the sky, in numbers, and some could carry tightly rolled scraps of paper with ideas from here to there. If Joubert had had downtown pigeons in mind, or artists living where, but happily not how, the pigeons do—Facility is the enemy of great things.

As I’d said, there are no big cities near to us; the geography’s delights require subtle and schooled looking; the weather tests your sincerity; fifteen minutes from the city’s edge you can be lost, and dead (add an hour and fifteen minutes in the winter cold); no great industries abound; no great wealth. It is necessary to dream a city. We’ve done that. Joubert concurs, Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

Idea city, dream city. Avoid: Minds that are made of material, and so much they spread only shadow-like bodies that are opaque (Joseph Joubert, 1801). And further to the density of material thinking, Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea in any way be treated as a thing. Which is why artists remain elusive, why Winnipeg quicksilvers itself away from the manipulations of currency and trends, why it bewilders other places with its resourcefulness and endless invention.

If William Gass and Joseph Joubert lived in the same city, they’d be friends for sure. In his essay The Artist and Society, Gass asks why works of art are so socially important. He answers his own question by saying it’s because they insist more than most on their own reality; because of the absolute way in which they exist…. Reality is not a matter of fact, he says, "it’s an achievement and it is rare…. A work of art must be all there…. Works of art confront us the way few people dare to: completely, openly, at once."²

From this substantial matter artists build Winnipeg. Constructed from ideas, from what Joubert pointedly identifies as severe taste and prodigious imagination, artists make reality. Odd that Gass’s mandatory all there is still conjured from dreams and imagination and has sufficient authority to make governments quake and call censor. In this scrappy, hard-pressed city, this plain, honest, crumbling city (and province) beaten about by the most modest of middling, pedestrian leadership, it still applies. Joubert reassures us, All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so. How do you build a city? Winnipeg writer Robert Kroetsch might have asked if he hadn’t asked: How do you grow a poet?

What we have, as artists, in making a city of ideas, a city both real and here and in that sought-after heightened state of what’s possible, is freedom. Joubert writes, Freedom. The freedom to do something well. There is no need of any other kind.

Joubert’s book of fragments parallels how we piece and collage a world together here, our ideal, idea city. We’ve made a significant place, this dream city, Winnipeg. He says, If you want to think well, to write well, to act well, first make a ‘place’ for yourself, a ‘true place.’ And this we’ve done.

Endnotes

1 Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, trans.

and intro. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005).

2 William Gass, The Artist and Society, in Fiction and the Figures of Life (Boston: Nonpareil Books/David R. Godine, 1979).

A Pale Nimbus of Melancholy

When my mother died, I was left to empty and close their house. I had visited my parents over and over in the house in which I’d grown up and had left when I was a young adult. Latterly more often, keeping in frequent contact with my mother following my father’s death. After she died, and beginning the process of dismantling and packing, I noticed an object in the kitchen on a pass-through counter near the back door, something I hadn’t remembered seeing there before. It was a wooden horse, thirty centimetres long and twenty-two centimetres high at the crest of his neck, with a rider on his back—a leather figure in an appropriate scale. The object wasn’t unfamiliar. It was my grandmother’s manufacture. I think I’d seen it at my grandparents’ cottage years and years before and perhaps more recently on one shelf of the small Sheraton book cabinet my grandmother had been allowed to place in her room at the nursing home. (My grandmother died at 98. She’d given birth to my mother when she was 21. My mother could utter Mother for seventy-seven years.)

In 2007 Verso published Walter Benjamin’s Archive.¹ Four editors assembled material Benjamin had held safe by sending it to friends and colleagues, correctly anticipating his being hounded and hunted by the Nazis until his death in 1940. Thirteen of his archives are included in the volume, which reveals, as the editors say, the passions of a collector. For Benjamin the activities of a writer included clipping and cutting, montage and assembly, excerpting and quotation. Details closely regarded would, for him, be revelatory; the incidental and what resided in the margins were a world where Baudelaire’s ragpicker scouring the Paris arcades would be the archivist assembling the data for study. The editors tell us through their careful reading of these thirteen archives that Benjamin didn’t believe collecting was based on precision or exactness. In his essay Unpacking My Library from volume 2 of his Selected Writings, he wrote that a collector is tied, among other things, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.² In his selecting particular objects to which he attached a collector’s passion, the editors said, Benjamin was anarchic, resisting the readily classifiable. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector, the whole background of an item, writes Benjamin in Unpacking My Library, adds up to a magic encyclo­pedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. Which draws me to Gramma’s wooden horse and its significance for me as a particular object, and to Peter Schwenger’s book The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects and his definition of the essential meaning of objects.³ Schwenger says there is a melancholy to physical objects. Maybe not if they were to exist alone in the world without us. It is we who attribute the state of melancholy to them in their reminding us, or making evident to us in our perceiving them, that we and they are two in the world and not one, and we are, therefore, not whole. This knowledge is loss, and recognizing the loss provokes an unresolvable melancholy. It is also, incidentally, a state of some value, even desirable, in that it engenders or spurs us to art making where we are able, and, failing that, is a goad to awareness not so far from Benjamin’s identifying a world in the detail of an object.

Schwenger suggests that the comfort we derive from familiar objects lies in our perceiving them as repositories of some aspect of ourselves, a feeling that is accompanied in that recognition by a sense of loss. But I’m wondering here if the feeling of loss may well derive from the sensible, pragmatic side of ourselves that recognizes that the object, however fondly regarded and closely held, is still a piece of fired clay or a scuffed old plush bear or a chair whose bare arms have been rubbed and worn by the hands of generations but still remains wooden. My largely but not wholly practical sense acknowledges Schwenger’s calling up Freud’s argued death drive, a moment, he argues, of longing (one of many) for an anterior state of things, the state indeed of being a thing. Restful it might in fact be, but then he notes Freud’s pointing out that there is only momentary rest as consciousness is achieved and we oscillate between moving in a lively, inexorable way toward death and pulling back in our desire to resist.

Near to impossible in its quicksilver state is Sartre’s en soi, a perfect globe of a thing that dares not exist even as an idea in that just being an idea requires naming and therefore implies ownership and therefore becomes an object to a subject. Here, the slip to loss and then melancholy is trout-silent. A more solid tie is to Benjamin’s object in a collection that becomes the magic encyclopedia housing the enlarging circle of affiliated memories.

Benjamin’s sense of collecting’s essence isn’t shared by Baudrillard, who, Schwenger says, sees collecting as a response to alienation. It is because he feels himself alienated or at least lost within a social discourse whose rules he cannot fathom that the collector is drawn to construct an alternative discourse. He would shape a world of his own making, fully comprehensible and one in which he exercises control. Schwenger points out an intriguing contradiction in the form of what he calls a double bind. In lieu of the desired control, the self-determined collector finds an aura of melancholy adhering to the collection. Unable to complete it (which completing is the collection’s manifest goal), the collector experiences a sense of loss. Alternately, completing it means arriving at the end.

Contra Baudrillard’s grim outcome for collectors, done or still acquiring, is Walter Benjamin from Unpacking My Library: for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

I’m looking at my grandmother’s horse and rider. I admire the object; I have no desire to be that object or any other—coveted, loved, familiar. Sartre’s autonomy holds no appeal. Instead, I look at this figurine and find it full. It’s not a souvenir as Susan Stewart defined it in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, where an insatiable nostalgia is its defining characteristic.⁴ Neither is it Proust’s madeleine, where, by its almost sacramental placement on his tongue, he is transported in time back through his life to its earliest days. Rather, it is a resonant thing, rich and cubic in every aspect of its representation.

My grandmother spent her childhood on a farm. She always loved horses and as an adult would cut them out in a wink for anyone who requested it, like a magician, with her embroidery scissors in one gesture, using whatever paper was near. Separating the legs—behold—they would stand.

The horse before me is wooden. His left foreleg has been broken off. As I remember him, he was never otherwise. His colour would be described as chestnut. His flared tail had broken off, too, but had been reattached with a medical adhesive tape bound, so it wouldn’t show except for the edge where it does, in a strip from a brown kid glove sewn in place with coarse black thread. A Western-style wooden saddle sits on the horse’s back and a most miraculous rider sits on it. The rider is constructed from the fingers of a fine, dark brown kid glove, or maybe two. As I remember her, Gramma would have had no compunction about cutting up a serviceable pair of good kid gloves if they struck her as best suited for the purpose. Each leg is one finger. Each arm is one finger. That’s four. His body might be the palm and back of the same glove, which could have been the remaining one, its mate lost in a taxi. Or it might be the case that a complete pair was sacrificed. Then there are his chaps to account for—also dark brown kid and conjuring Made in France. His head is the end of a finger of a white kid glove with the tip bent over his forehead like a cap and held in place with a nicely executed French knot in bright red embroidery floss. A length of this same red floss is a generous tie around his waist ending in long loops. His eyebrows, eyes, and nose are stitched in black thread. Another strip of leather serves as a cinch under the girth of the horse, tacked to each of the rider’s toes and holding him in place. Strips of a different brown leather are the reins