So much wisdom in Anita Amirrezvani’s Blood of Flowers, and especially pp 350-351:
“I did not reveal that I was the carpet’s designer and knotter. I thought if she saw my callused fingers or looked closely at my tired red eyes–if she understood the fearsome work that a carpet demanded–its beauties would be forever tarnished in her eyes. Better for her to imagine it being made by a carefree young girl who skipped across hillsides plucking flowers for dyes before settling down to tie a few relaxing knots in between sips of pomegranate juice.”
My personal analogue: Delivering custom art creation orders on Second Life, and the sort of prejudice that often comes with the package… “Oh, so you’re proprietor-creator (pity tone)?”
“I knew otherwise: my back ached, my limbs were stiff, and I had not slept enough for a month. I thought about all the labor and suffering that were hidden beneath a carpet, starting with the materials. Vast fields of flowers had to be murdered for their dye, innocent worms boiled alive for their silk–and what about knotters? Must we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of rugs?
It’s for the obsession.
“I had heard stories about women who became deformed by long hours of sitting at the loom so that when they tried to deliver a child, their bones formed a prison locking the baby inside. In such cases, mother and child would die after many hours of anguish. Even the youngest knotters suffered aching backs, bent limbs, tired fingers, exhausted eyes. All our labors were in service of beauty, but sometimes it seemed as if every thread in a carpet had been dipped in the blood of flowers.
“These were things that Maryam would never know…”
And similarly, these are things that most people would never know… synthetic beauty is created not only at a price, but at the expense of life — the devotion of an individual to the solidification of an abstract image, the enormous amount of self discipline involved to not only work on the task but to continue–instead of running around out in the physical open… sometimes just for the heck of it and sometimes because you’re living in poverty and do need the money or because you’ve foolishly wound yourself up in demanding financial obligations…
In many respects, I’m lucky that I get to take time out to experience this sort of self-imprisonment and to explore its potential as a creative outlet. I think my ideal fate would doom me to “luxuriate in the most immaculate of prisons (358).” As I’m doing now in my YoS… carpeting weaving in a digital world in my own prison.
