The Book Of Disquiet: A Thread of Dark Green Silk

“A whole way of life lies before me.

I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked so that this woman in front of me on the tram should wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth”.

The Book of Disquiet is full of such amazing, heart stopping moments captured in limpid yet often hugely dense prose. The genius of Pessoa is obsession with the fragmentary and the momentary and yet appreciation that behind each fragment and moment lies a whole world. A ‘whole way of life’. 

Such it is with the green thread on a woman’s dress on a tram in central Lisbon. An everyday journey with everyday people and yet the thread, perhaps a cousin to the madeleine in Proust which stimulates memory of specific past events, is a surface glimpse of an entire past which is comprised of all of the separate individual contributions that have led to that woman wearing that dress with that thread being in that place on that tram at that time.

Those circumstances will never again occur in quite that formation. The observer is granted a unique opportunity in which to encompass the full history of the moment. 

One might describe this as the antique quotidian. 

A point in time in an unremarkable day that reflects so much else but is in itself of no consequence. Yet it reflects multitudes which are unknown to the observer. The observer knows that more of those multitudes are known to the wearer of the dress and that increasing degrees of knowledge can be extended to the point when the wearer first caught sight of the dress and then back to the point at which the maker decided to use that particular weave and that particular thread.

The full profundity starts to become apparent as seemingly incidental decisions culminate in a moment full of deep meaning for one observer on a Lisbon tram. 

No wonder that the observer becomes dizzy. He imagines the lives of the workers, their realities, their homes, the source of the material. It all happens in a moment but is transcendental in effect.

The observer leaves the tram exhausted. As if he has lived a whole life. And, so, in the sense meant by Pessoa he has indeed through an acceleration of time’s arrow which has returned to its point of origin and then flown untethered through all the successive moments to pierce the eye of the observer.

I have a longstanding obsession with this notion of the everyday moment - how nothing can ever be quite the same again; that how something actually is depends on everything that has gone before so that each moment is truly antique culmination which by its very nature is as old as the hills. 

Pessoa gives this the greatest effect of any writer of whom I am aware and uses the most extraordinary literary techniques to worry away at the simultaneity of direct profound recognition of the significance of a moment and the utter unknowability of why it is as it is. 

To read The Book of Disquiet is to be waylaid by these extraordinary apercus on a continual basis. 

The ‘regular irregularity’ of the thread both captures a moment and describes a whole way of writing about the world for which Pessoa is fabulously equipped. Underpinned by a lugubrious fatalism the constant battle to continue to live with banality and tedium is central to his view of the world. 

Then the focus achieved through the individual moment brings everything into sharp, depleting and almost overwhelming relief.

That thread of dark green silk should be as well-known as the madeleine. 

Anni Albers: Sculpting With Thread

Wandering around this kaleidoscopic exhibition at the Tate put me in mind of so many other artists that I began to wonder whether Albers was a conduit for their influence or whether I was simply engaged in a procession of imagined serendipity.

It may seem strange to begin with a sculptor given that Albers primarily worked with textiles but I was constantly reminded of Brancusi. The wonder of Brancusi is that he aims to reveal and develop the inherent nature of the material whether stone, wood or metal. The form that he finds is therefore perfectly suited to the stuff with which he is working.

What is striking with Albers is that she does exactly this with the techniques applied to different types of material. Development In Rose (one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition) is made from linen and the impurities and imperfections in the thread are used in essence as highlights. The slightly muted colour also captures the often slightly faded nature of the linen palette.

This is later conceptualised as the ‘event of the thread’ particularly through the use of knots and free lines using brocading - a technique that allows for improvisation because it allows thread to be added over the basic weave. As she said: ‘The thoughts … can, I believe, be traced back to the event of a thread'. So strong is the emphasis on the tactile that this is close to sculpting with the material.

The frequency with which alarms went off in the exhibition because people were keen to be closer to and in fact wanted to touch and feel the exhibits is a testament to the supremely attractive quality of the combination of material, colour and weave. When seen up close the effect is utterly compelling. 

The second major influence - and likely a direct influence given that both attended the Bauhaus at the same time - is Paul Klee. The use of small colour blocks (see above) is very reminiscent of the approach used by Klee to capture light fractured into tiny pieces in a vast environment such as a desert.

Then there is Robert Delaunay in the use and development of colour theory and the representation of the colour spectrum. Looking at 'Sunny' (below) by Albers reminded me very strongly of Delaunay pieces seeing to represent the way that light, particularly strong sunlight, refracts into different colours.

Other pieces with stronger abstract patterns deliberately place colours in relation to each other given their position on the spectrum. Colour Studies not surprisingly gives effect to this .....

Albers also achieves a remarkably immersive quality. The extraordinary Torah scrolls have almost a 3D effect when stared at for some time; the pieces simultaneously move towards the viewer and drag the viewer in akin to the effect of a monumental Rothko. They also share the characteristic of being explicitly architectural in that, as was often the case for Rothko, the pieces were designed for a particular space and were an opportunity for Albers to give effect to her ideas about the role of textiles as part of broader architectural design. 

But there are some aspects of Albers that seem wholly sui genesis bringing together in extraordinary effect motifs to which she seems to return constantly. In Red and Blue Layers she has fashioned cotton knots which resemble the wheatsheaf interspersed with verticals in a completely beguiling and endlessly fascinating combination which seems at once centuries old (it certainly reminded me of 17th century fabric design) and completely new. Given that I could happily stare at this for hours why not do just that .....

Many of Albers' more regular pattern designs now looks as though they come from a catalogue. There's a reason for that. She has been so enormously influential that we now don't fully realise the extent to which her work has imbued so much of what we see and experience. However, what a catalogue most certainly cannot capture is the desire, as with the best sculpture, to set off those alarms and hold the material in your own hands.