RAPTURES

Derangement and meditation are first cousins.

It was from a cousin that I learned to make Ukrainian eggs, actually, when I was ten. I sat down to some candles and dyes and eggs and tiny funnels for molten wax and made a few tentative, wobbly lines, and within a few hours of the “meditative” practice of preserving color under miniscule wax applications upon the fragile artifact of a small fowl’s reproductive cycle, I was prepared to give my firstborn child if someone would just let me keep working until I died of exhaustion.

(My firstborn, it turns out, is the kind of person who would understand such a move, blessedly, but more on that later.)

Same goes for basket-weaving when I was four: any interruption, including for lunch, was an idiotic imposition by oversized clowns concerned with such mundane things as the nourishment of the body.

I was like some kind of craft-monk, eschewing the needs of the mortal meat-bag to feed the soul with Making.

The “tell,” the reason you know I’m not just meditative but full-blown deranged, is that I have very little concern for getting it right, if supplies run low or something goes wrong. I just need to be doing it. In fact, in many cases, the greater the risk of failure, the greater the precarity, the more fun I’m having (how many Ukrainian eggs have I cracked, busted, blobbed, ruined? And if it wasn’t a completely unworkable, yolky pile, kept going?)

I once knit a blanket for my grandmother from a method I’d never done before called intarsia, which required making about fifty different mini-bobbins of color (I performed this step incredibly shittily, and with great, slobbering pleasure), deeply unconcerned that I was getting the transitions only half right. The blanket is about the size of a football field and contains bumpy ridges between colors and holes where I knowingly mismatched the sizes of the yarn because I could not be bothered to get up and go to the yarn store to get the correct gauge of material. I could not tolerate the thought of leaving the project, even to get the things the project required.

Painting: same. I go at a canvas like it’s the gravy I’m about to lick off a plate. And at the very moment where the thing looks really quite beautiful for a moment, it is one of my deepest pleasures to go in without any hesitation whatsoever and well and truly cock it up with just one more (ruinous) swipe, one more ecstatic, obliterating swabbing, because it just. feels. so. good. to be there.

My husband calls it The Rapture. When I’m “in” a thing, I cannot get out, or really actually should not, lest I yoink my body-soul like the Harry Potter characters getting splinched when they disapparate. Because said husband has no wish to see me any further removed from what I’ve been able to fashion into a sanity lookalike most of the time, said husband simply sighs when he sees the glazed/crazed look wash over my eyeballs. He silently takes the reins of the household, resenting me the whole time, but nonetheless protecting my rapturous derangement like a dutiful rooster with long spurs and a cold eye for predators (children and phone calls).

Lest I lead you to believe this is all an elaborately douchey humble-brag, let me disclose just a few of the many, many less compelling results of The Rapture’s engagement:

—a “Thai Peanut Sauce” dinner that consisted entirely of expired tofu blobs and lumps of unsalted peanut butter because I could not be bothered to go to the store and get literally ANY of the ingredients I needed for the thing I wanted to make

—a “vest” I knit “for myself” without consulting a pattern or checking my gauge or even measuring myself because a friend gave me yarn from Peru and it WAS YELLOW AND THEREFORE NEEDED TO HAPPEN IMMEDIATELY, a “vest” which resembles lingerie for a teddy bear and lives in the front entryway-turned-storage-room-since-we-haven’t-had-any-front-steps-for-ten-years-anyway

—Ukrainian eggs that are cracked and/or un-drained because I couldn’t be bothered to start over or to finish properly: eggs still full of their contents, years or decades later, upon my knick-knacks shelf, which, if toppled (likely), will suffuse the air with rotten/moldy egg smell for weeks

—Paintings that can only be described as “bathroom art,” if they are described at all, which they are not, because they’re now considered “canvases” and are stacked somewhere awaiting reuse. Each of these was probably halfway decent at some point, but because I simply could not stay my own hand, they’re now the paint-bound equivalent of someone having received a large and various bouquet and responded with “oh how beautiful!” and then immediately sticking it blooms-down in the blender and pressing the “smoothie” button.

— “songs” that I recorded on a bed with an old, forty-pound laptop, like, we’re talking, I laid down nineteen different tracks with dialed-in levels of reverb and everything, probably took me six hours and cost me the feeling in both legs— all without bothering to actually write the thing, or perhaps notice that it was just a few fragments of ideas that sounded like someone coming out of anesthesia trying to convince the cops they’re ok to drive.

All of this to say: irrespective of outcomes, I am committed to this rapturous, if singeing, way of life.

So I could hardly believe my luck when it became clear that my firstborn (same child 10-year-old me would have traded for the opportunity to Pysanky myself to death) was in fact also a bit of a rapturer. As one hopes will be the case with offspring, she is a vast improvement on the previous generation’s model, with programming that actually allows her to take snack and bathroom breaks and find the best-fit materials for the process at hand instead of starving, having to pee the whole time, and using lint from the rug when she runs out of yarn. I am stupidly excited by this finding, which first occurred at the yarn store.

Valhalla

But things started really getting fun when we stumbled on a game where our raptures can meet and mingle. I call the game “color turns,” and am embarrassingly happy, as in I begin salivating, when we find ourselves setting up to play it. And that’s always how it works— we “find ourselves” doing it; we stumble upon it; it is as if the game finds us. That is part of its estimable joy. We never even set about trying to invent it in the first place; it invented itself at our hands, as each of our individual ways and means joined as if in a greater current.

Color Turns began as a doodle, I suppose, one that someone added to, and then the other person got excited by the addition and made her own, until we found quite naturally and without thinking that it was deeply pleasurable to continue building on whatever had come before.

Some of the pleasure of course came from getting ourselves out of scrapes. The other day, for example, I began adding interior festoons to a design we’d started, and instead of adding the loop to every other arm of the star, I accidentally added a contiguous loop— and my daughter quickly pointed it out to me: “No, mom, you’re supposed to do the next one,” she said, silently intuiting my intent and then my failure to follow through as planned.

“Oh!” I said, “yeah, I did an extra. Here, we’ll just do all of them, then,” I said, and filled in every gap into a sort of gel-pen festooning ribbon. She smiled and sighed, happy inside the restorative capacity of improvisation.

Another pleasure of Color Turns is admiring your partner’s choices. In that same game session as above, I decided to do a “color-in” turn where I filled in some background around a bunch of little dashes my daughter had made inside each arm of the star. She whispered “Oh my god,” very seriously, and I laughed because I thought she was feeling bummed out by how long my turn was going to take. But she asked me why I was laughing and I told her, and she said, “No, mama. I said oh my god because what you chose was so beautiful.”

I was immediately humbled by this sincere and deep appreciation. I was made solemn. And, as often happens with my children, suddenly ecstatically grateful, as a swamp monster who leaps out of the murk and chowder of the daily slog to receive the purification of sunshine.

But there was something even more stunning to me about our most recent Color Turns game, and that was my daughter’s opening move. Usually I start with a circle or oval, Ukrainian egg style. It’s part of my jam, my crafting and doodling DNA by now, the Opening Oval. But this time I nudged a paper towards my daughter and said, “you start.”

She selected a gold pen and made five dashes in a circular orientation, as if giving me a partial circle, an implied whole, with gaps in it. It took my breath away that she had included space in her opening move, as if in overt invitation to me as her game partner. It was almost sweetly flirtatious, her playful and inclusive care in delivering this particular arrangement up to my turn. The pleasure of adding in the spikes of the star that her shape implied was all the greater for knowing she’d purposefully left the gaps for me to do just that. I was both improvising/exploring and fulfilling a sort of “in-joke” or intimate hope of a person I love.

It seems to me that the best relationships often hold within them a type of Color Turns game, where we put something down, and our partner has the opportunity and invitation to add to it. There are a lot of ways to respond to what’s come before— elaboration, subversion, texturizing, gilding, filling in, emphasizing, deemphasizing… and the list goes on. But the project is a joint one, and even contrasting choices harmonize. In fact, the contrasts often harmonize most vibrantly.

The point is, I think, that the more playful and committed we can be in the unpredictable process of co-creation, the more alive we are to each other’s choices— appreciating, gasping, correcting, inviting, adjusting, decorating—the more exciting the creation becomes.

Maybe part of why I believe my daughter is an upgrade on my Rapture Operating System is that her mode seems natively inclusive and collaborative. I, by contrast, received low marks across the board on elementary school report cards in the column of “works well with others.” (Hence the necessary rooster-patrol during my bouts with the rapture.)

This isn’t to say that working alone doesn’t have its place or its specific kind of power. But it sure is good for my burnt-out heart to see my child moving fluidly where I have struggled to, at the table with others, and to feel the easy current of her teachings moving around and through me, even as she appreciates my own ember-hot and necessarily limited way of proceeding.

That fire could beget water is a mystery I’ll never stop loving. But maybe it’s no mystery at all: the point, after all, isn’t for her fluidity to douse my flame, nor for my molten take to to boil her to steam— but for us to hear the sweet sizzle between our very different raptures when they touch, along their many fond and lingering edges, as we play.

the opening move

the closing move