MOTHERS: Pearls
My mother has a string of imitation pearls: they are not real. They have not been gathered from the bottom of the ocean by the boys who dive at a depth of 8 to 20 fathoms and can hold their breath for up to an hour.
In terms of her characteristics and structure, my mother has thin milky skin, the pads of her feet have a scratched and delicate luster, her emotions are irregularly shaped in very fine layers, the interplay of the veins on her legs form beautiful colors, she both absorbs and reflects light.
As I am drawing at the kitchen table, my mother is standing at the sink peeling black pearls for dinner which are very expensive because they are so rare thinking: how did I end up in this life as a pearl peeler?
Did you know you can bully an oyster into forming a pearl? She says as she puts me to bed. Just lock it in a cage submerge the cage underwater imprison the oyster in the cage for several years in cold total darkness until it forms a pearl of desirable thickness.
There is a value system to mothers, determined by a special unit of weight called the mother grain. In general, the value of the mother increases with the square of the weight. My mother is marred, prismatic, Baroque; when you were forming inside me, she says, it was like the most irritating foreign matter. An endoscope is an x-ray machine that shows the center of a mother, so you can distinguish the genuine mother from the non-genuine. She believes it is better not to own the real thing there is less need to worry about the pearl thieves who tear the pearls right off the woman’s neck in the process slitting the woman’s throat.
Care of pearls: by now it should be apparent that my aim with these blended reflections is to create the many layers of meaning that we think of when we use the word “mother.”
In my drawing the boys are diving for imitation pearls to sustain the large imitation pearl industry the boys are from Ceylon Japan India Burma the boys and the pearls are both representations a representation has but a fraction of the value of the real the boys are not from anywhere we have almost destroyed the market for mothers so the boys have no mothers anymore they must wear the pearls themselves the pearls are not real the boys are not real but these boys can hold their breath forever.
In terms of her characteristics and structure, my mother has thin milky skin, the pads of her feet have a scratched and delicate luster, her emotions are irregularly shaped in very fine layers, the interplay of the veins on her legs form beautiful colors, she both absorbs and reflects light.
As I am drawing at the kitchen table, my mother is standing at the sink peeling black pearls for dinner which are very expensive because they are so rare thinking: how did I end up in this life as a pearl peeler?
Did you know you can bully an oyster into forming a pearl? She says as she puts me to bed. Just lock it in a cage submerge the cage underwater imprison the oyster in the cage for several years in cold total darkness until it forms a pearl of desirable thickness.
There is a value system to mothers, determined by a special unit of weight called the mother grain. In general, the value of the mother increases with the square of the weight. My mother is marred, prismatic, Baroque; when you were forming inside me, she says, it was like the most irritating foreign matter. An endoscope is an x-ray machine that shows the center of a mother, so you can distinguish the genuine mother from the non-genuine. She believes it is better not to own the real thing there is less need to worry about the pearl thieves who tear the pearls right off the woman’s neck in the process slitting the woman’s throat.
Care of pearls: by now it should be apparent that my aim with these blended reflections is to create the many layers of meaning that we think of when we use the word “mother.”
In my drawing the boys are diving for imitation pearls to sustain the large imitation pearl industry the boys are from Ceylon Japan India Burma the boys and the pearls are both representations a representation has but a fraction of the value of the real the boys are not from anywhere we have almost destroyed the market for mothers so the boys have no mothers anymore they must wear the pearls themselves the pearls are not real the boys are not real but these boys can hold their breath forever.