Quilt Vomit

Backgrounds in Mother’s Urn resemble melting ice cubes that re-solidify halfway into tiles or quilt squares that resemble widened, abstracted magnifications of the two quilts that show up early in the text (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 3).Rather than stitched together securely, these images refuse such easy sutures, instead underpinned by gentle gradations of green and aqua that move dizzyingly through firm, black lines that seemingly fragment each body and object.  When it shows up, this flowing color undoes the divisive effect of the black lines, so that every memory has boundaries that are always transgressed; there is a discomfort between the lines and the colors that ignore those lines.

A childlike tricycle-riding figure is sliced up by those black lines, but those black lines allow that figure’s relationship to the background; the lines seem arbitrary and the figure moves toward no certain location, awash in various objects atop a tile-quilt background whose churning colors sweep everything along too fast and too slow to divvy up, dry out, scoop out of the background (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  The Oceanic palettes complement the references to blue pills, giving the impression that these backgrounds are infinitely permeable, watery and only momentarily “solid,” subject to shifting perceptions that have a consistent relationship to those pills.  The details around change, although fluids are often present, just as the text hones in on different details, moments, memories.  Time breaks open and it doesn’t heal.

Juxtaposing flowing motion (like the background) with inanimate references to “motion” (objects in mid-flight/mid-flow), Art Deco swooping angles smoke and rapidly abandon several cigarettes in a floating ashtray (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  There isn’t enough heat to keep those cigarettes smoldering but there’s so much heat that the wineglasses and fork can’t withstand the heat (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Everything is either burned up, drowned, or both.  Even more line-segmented than the child’s leg, the hand of a parent claws into view like a stained glass mannequin that can’t quite attain full animation(Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  An absent Tamara de Lempicka could be snorting enough coke to get a bit of a nosebleed, and her green lady’s nose springs like a jack-in-the-box out of a tambourine clock hotplate that melts, caves in where numbers would be on a clock that can still tell time or where the burner spiral would screw into the base on a hotplate that can maintain a stable temperature (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Liquid is the most “still,” its particle flecks frozen mid-spray rather than seeming full of motion, like the color in the quilt background (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Wine is interchangeable with blood; they share similar shades.  There are attempts to anchor moments in object-based detail, and the sense that time is moving quickly around these floating but relatively visible objects.

The fly wings connected to the child in the upper left corner contrast with the whole fly under the dome in the lower right corner (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Body parts can stick together through solid lines, but the places where those limbs join wings or a calf joins another part of same calf are arbitrary (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  The fly wings close-up are the same on a human or on a fly; images can be cut up and re-glued together over and over again, with the same visuals standing out but no stable composite whole (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Look at the fly far away but under a dome; it’s trapped amidst puzzle pieces at odds (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Tie a fly’s wings to a child on a tricycle; they’re trapped in reconstituted pieces (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).   Everything is a swallowed-down, thrown-up, incomplete run-on sentence that is blocked out, remembered through drugged filters, and difficult to process.

From the get-go, forks fly along roses, almost standing in for their thorns.  Evoking the delightful dining referenced by the text, these forks seem to facilitate enjoyable evenings.  It’s easy to forget how sharp they are for all of their appeal, much like the mother’s boyfriend(s) in this memoir.  Fractures across an arm reveal blood earlier on to show a body opening as the mother is idyllically romanced, vulnerable in a seemingly desirable way (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 2-3).  While this can be ominous, it is also comforting; blood is a part of her body that can be seen inside and on her arm (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 2-3).  It is overtly a part of her, produced within her, distinguishable from wine and other substances that do not feature largely in the image.  Later, white and red fluids can be produced inside or outside of humans; their porousness is not detailed; everyone leaks, drinks, and leaks some more while the objects around also lose any ability to contain one instance or memory from another (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).

Wine glasses are in the midst of a backwards and forwards mitosis; two wine glasses are dividing from one and one is merging into two; they melt (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 10).  Holding down details proves challenging, and images may be doubled or blurred.  Those arbitrary lines seem an attempt to hold down images in a sequence that refuses chronology.  Time is a drugged: “Until the parties stopped” (Gribnikova & Kalamity J 11).  When motion becomes more standardized, images become singular, the montages are less montage-y, and color schemes are not so much like quilts that once held the illusion of “whole memories” that have become explosions of oceanic vomit that contain focused-on details that are part of larger memory collages.  It’s not that life gets easier to swallow and keep down; it’s that memories are depicted differently at this juncture, so that the after-effects of the “parties” become delineated as scenes rather than pieces of scenes converging as one, long “party” (binge).