Another small memory

 I didn't think of this close to the actual anniversary (which was last week) but I periodically think about this piece of artwork:

("Four Figures," Katharine Cobey. The photo is from this older profile of her.) The photo, and a short essay about her work, appeared in the winter 2001/2002 Interweave Knits magazine (I have my copy of it somewhere, I could not quickly lay my hands on it. 

There's another photo of it, from a different angle, here. I don't think I recognized the "linked" quality of the figures before - the shroud that one wears continues over the other three.

Anyway. The article was in the first issue of IK after the September 11 attacks. The editorial staff didn't say much - I suspect the magazine was ready to go to press at that point. There was, as I remember, a pair of "Ladder of Life" socks as a sort of memorial to all the firefighters lost trying to rescue people, and there was some comment in the editor's remarks about "we didn't know how to present this issue; it almost seemed disrespectful to show happy people wearing sweaters given all that happened"

And the "Four Figures" was not really linked to anything about the attacks (though maybe the editor may have made a comment about what many perceived as the resigned quality of the figures, facing the future - maybe death? - stoically?)

But yes, it struck me. And I think of it often when I think of that time. And the sculpture does seem to me to recall the old, old ideas about how passage to the Afterlife was over a river or a sea, how you got in a boat and there was a ferryman who took you across, and it does very much feel to me like these figures are facing toward death and the Afterlife, and are somehow linked together - maybe members of the same family? (The figures somehow seem female to me, like sisters. Maybe it's because it's a fiber installation?). I'm also reminded of the (several) paintings Böcklin did called "Isle of the Dead," which features a figure transporting what must be a coffin to an island with limestone tombs and cypress trees. (And in at least the version with which I am most familiar, there's a female figure in the boat too - a priestess to do last rites? The wife of the deceased? Though I guess another interpretation is that the figure is the soul of the deceased, traveling along with its body? At any rate, the painting had quite wide-ranging cultural effects)

That painting gives me a strange sensation. I can't say I LIKE it; but at the same time I don't dislike it. I can't quite explain it. It's compelling to look at. (Perhaps moreso now that I've had far more experiences of loss than a few years ago). I joked on twitter that maybe I'm becoming a Goth as I age (stereotypically, Goths are obsessed with death) but I don't think that's it. 

But it is odd how you come to relate art you see to events. I don't know exactly when Cobey made the sculpture but it notes elsewhere it took seven years to construct, so I am sure it was not a response to the attacks. 

It's also odd, as I noted, the horror and shock that shut everything down for a few days (one weird memory I have is of the "fluff" channels just....going away....putting up title cards saying "out of respect" and not broadcasting) and also things like the editor of Interweave commenting that they didn't know what to do.....and now, while we've lost in the US alone, some 200 times as many people as in the attacks, and yet....we're sniping at each other, and fighting, and.... I guess back to what passes for "normal" now? (I do remember the push to "go out and spend" later in 2001, to keep the economy going, and as someone raised on stories of WWII rationing from older relatives, it was kind of cognitively dissonant....)

Being a human is strange and hard to navigate some times.