“all of you bowing to it saying thank you, thank you my lucky stars” (Jorie Graham)

Friends came for dinner last night and because they’d been to Granada and we were just home from that beautiful city, I made a Spanish meal. Paella, full of sausage, chicken, swimming scallops, and octopus. (I had several bags of octopus tentacles in the freezer and prepared the contents of one of them, pausing before I skinned the tentacle which I’d just steamed for a hour to tenderize it to marvel at the unexpected spiral.)

Anyway, I made paella, salad, and a tarte made as one makes tarte tatin but with pears and figs poached in dry sherry and honey. We talked of Spain, we listened to Estrella Morente sing, and after dinner we went to our living room for coffee, at least coffee for those brave enough to drink it in the evening. (John did, and was awake for hours. I continued with Spanish wine…) My friend asked me to tell her the source of the image at the top of my website, this one:

She was sitting on the leather couch, the back draped with a quilt. Behind you, I said. And she turned to see this (or at least a completed version of this:

She was puzzled and so I explained how I’d gathered beach stones at Trail Bay

and tied them in diagonal rows on some coarse white linen. Then I made many immersions in a vat of indigo. Depending on the day, and my mood, I think of the resulting pattern as snow angels or birds. I showed my friend how I’d quilted with spirals and that reminded me of the octopus tentacles we’d just eaten, cut into pieces, sauteed in olive oil, and added to a pan of bomba rice, saffron broth, sofritto of onion, garlic, red pepper, and tomato, seasoned with smoked Spanish paprika, and simmered with chicken, chorizo, and small pink-shelled scallops. I thought of John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” We do. How else would friends in a room on the edge of the Pacific find themselves remembering Granada, paella, the beach at Trail Bay, indigo dye, a blue quilt backed with soft red flannel to make it cosy for winter evenings?

Because she was interested in that particular quilt, I showed her a few others in our living room, more recent creations,

and what she said couldn’t have pleased me more. You could have a show of these, she said, at the Arts Centre, and when I went to bed after saying goodnight under a starry sky, I felt warm with her praise.

This afternoon, I was waiting for John to finish up at a group he attends and when he came out, he apologized for being late. There’d been a discussion on AI and he was countering the opinions of those who felt it could free us up to be more productive. He said, No, it would be the death of civilization. And he continued, as he related his defence to me on the long drive home. That an algorithm might well create Shakespearean sonnets but they wouldn’t be the work of someone who was both the product of a very interesting period in human history and its interpreter, its eloquent poet. His creations are unique in their genius and their beauty. They have shaped how we think, how we remember (I can still recite the sonnet I learned when I was 16, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”, and knowing its formula doesn’t at all diminish its profound meaning) and there is nothing like them. It was a much more complex discussion than this but I thought about it in the context of my quilts, their origins, where they lead me, what they allow me to discover–about colour, about texture, about the beauty of materials, about patience, about impatience, and their relationship to everything else I do.

Here are the opening lines of Jorie Graham’s astonishing poem, “Before”, written in response to Édouard Vuillard’s 1898 painting, Repast in a Garden.

it came, before the turn in the cherished
wind, what we called history, the turn
towards, all of it more and more
towards – what is it that is
coming – must come – unfathomable, unbreakable – you want it so, your
future, no the
future, so
badly – you stand
on the threshold of your century as on a high
parapet, brush in hand, a ladder wrinkling the air as it rises,
a kind of singing,
rung by rung –
all of you bowing to it saying thank you, thank you my lucky stars I am living
now – right now –
of all times this is the one now…

Can you imagine AI writing this? Can you imagine AI creating the painting that was its inspiration? Would you want to read that? Or to look at something with any human enterprise wrung from its pigment, its language, its emotional context? Its history?

I know which I prefer. And when I am working on an essay, when I am hanging shells from driftwood to catch the air in an unearthly music, when I am stitching spirals in linen I’ve tied and immersed in a dye-bath and let settle in my mind until I see how to use it, when I am wrapped in its comfort, reading sonnets by the son of a glove maker living in the late 16th/early 17th century, I am hitched to everything else in the Universe. And grateful for it.