aka finishing my book while sitting at the met cloisters on august 9 2026
one hundred years of solitude
Gabriel García Márquez. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1970.
unicorn in captivity
Creator Unknown. 1495-1505, wool warp with wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts, 144 7/8 x 99 in. (368 x 251.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Richard Preston. “Capturing the Unicorn.” The New Yorker, 3 Apr. 2005:
To make a digital image of the Unicorn tapestries was one of the most difficult assignments that Bridgers had ever had... The camera had a narrow view; it could photograph only one three-by-three-foot section of tapestry at a time. The photographers took overlapping pictures, moving the camera on skateboard wheels on the scaffolding. Each photograph was a tile that would be used to make a complete, seamless mosaic of each tapestry.
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When they tried to fit the puzzle pieces together, however, they wouldn't join properly—the warp and weft threads didn't run smoothly from one tile to the next. The differences were vast. It was as if a tapestry had not been the same object from one moment to the next as it was being photographed.
···
The tapestries, they realized, had changed shape as they were lying on the floor and being photographed. They had been hanging vertically for centuries; when they were placed on the floor, the warp threads relaxed. The tapestries began to breathe, expanding, contracting, shifting. It was as if, when the conservators removed the backing, the tapestries had woken up. The threads twisted and rotated restlessly. Tiny changes in temperature and humidity in the room had caused the tapestries to shrink or expand from hour to hour, from minute to minute. The gold- and silver-wrapped threads changed shape at different speeds and in different ways from the wool and silk threads.
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“The tapestry is like water,” Gregory said. “Water has no permanent shape.”
"In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants..."
a book of seven generations of men and women consumed by obsession and desire, by forces of isolation but not necessarily of distress, bound to a small town in central america.
a tapestry, the last in a set of seven woven in the netherlands 500 years ago, perhaps as a wedding gift, teeming with symbols of fertility and love and a unicorn bound to a tree by a chaine d'amour.
in both: a man and a unicorn chained to a tree.
in both: a million threads woven together, weft and weave, alive, permanent, impermanent, looping and looping and looping. mille-fleur scenery, lonesome and eternal and staunch figures surrounded by an endless web of flora and fauna real and unreal, hyper-stylized, alive and dead, full of love.
initials knotted loosely together and scattered across the jungle.
that bleeding pomegranate tree of obsession:
obsession with war (Colonel Aureliano Buendía), with knowledge (José Arcadio Buendía, José Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano), with sex (Aureliano Jose and Amaranta, Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula), with love (Renata Remedios, Amaranta).
an obession with the knowledge or the sex or the love that you
can't have or aren't supposed to have or that isn't the right time for you to have,
a need to feel real, to find something real, seeking it all but reduced in the end, always, to physicality. to the body.
hold the chain draped around my flesh waist and follow it back to the origin, pulling and pooling towards some origin of desire and obsession and i'm not sure what i find there.
"He saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man's time and space: 'The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.'"
myths and truths, real and unreal, the massacre at the train station, ancient parchment predictions, free will and determinism and the stories that are written.
what came first, the chicken or the egg?
"Aureliano recognized him, he pursued the hidden paths of his descent, and he found the instant of his own conception among the scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset bathroom where a mechanic satisfied his lust on a woman who was giving herself out of rebellion."
a single yellow butterfly, the instant of conception and origin amongst the noise, cocooned then hatched in an endless cycle and rebirth.
the thread of blood leading to a dead son's right ear, a trail of red ants crossing the porch and the bedrooms into the heart of the house, red droplets tracing the flank of the contented unicorn and red entwining each pair of initials, looping back on itself.
seven generations seven tapestries seven = completeness, spiritual awakening, and wisdom. even in the obsession. even in the solitude.
sources: the new yorker, wikimedia commons
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