Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: an excerpt

This is part of the chapter I read this morning. I’ve got a ton of thoughts about it all, but I’m not sure how to put it into words. In this excerpt, Rebecca West and her husband stop at a market in Macedonia, and look at the home-made dresses the women are selling. Because West is who she is – she sees, somehow, the entire history of the Balkans in the embroidery stitches. She’s one of those big-thinkers, people who can see things in a historical context (even when the world appears to be crumbling around them) – like Orwell, like Robert Kaplan … These people are not ordinary thinkers. They don’t see things the way the rest of us do. They teach us how to see properly.

Or – if not “properly” – then they teach us how to see things for ourselves, and how to see things in context. To see beneath the surface of things, to always inquire, to never accept things at face-value. Rebecca West’s power of sight seems to me to also bring a feminine filter, or maybe I should say female filter, to the landscape. She’s analyzing embroidery here, after all. Taking it seriously as an artform, and also as something that is indicative of something else. It’s all a symbol, everything is to be interpreted. And not just architecture, or literature, or political structures tell us about society – but the stitches of peasant women, too. The great thing about her book is that it is not JUST the female filter, which would be a huge yawn. Rebecca West doesn’t skimp on either side. You get the history, the political movements, the religious upheavals, the great sweeping hand of time – and then you also get the taste of the food, and the preponderance of paprika in all the recipes, etc., and you get descriptions of head scarves and skirts and shoes, and stockings. It’s both. Robert Kaplan uses Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as his inspiration for his own travel books, and it is quite apparent. You can taste the brandy when you read his books, you can hear the rain on the window, you can see the colors of the buildings. Rebecca West is his constant reminder – LOOK. SEE. ASK.

If I ever go to Macedonia, and see peasant women in traditional dress, I will think of this excerpt, and I will be grateful.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

– excerpt from the chapter called “Bitolj II”

“They are selling dresses,” I said with delight and so they were: new dresses for such peasant women as had come into the town to work and had neither the homespun cloth nor the leisure to make their own clothes and were still shy of Western attire, and old clothes that had such fine embroidery on them that they would be worn again. All these dresses were of the standard Slav pattern. They were made of white or cream homespun linen and were embroidered lavishly on the hems and sleeves and more sparingly around the neck. Nearly all of these were serious works of art. That will not be believed by those who know only the commercial peasant-art of Central Europe. The cross-stitched blouse of Austria and Hungary is tatty and ill-bred, rightly regarded by the aristocrat and the highbrow as vulgar and the proletarian as funny. It fails because the themes of peasant art are so profound and its technique so intricate that it requires a deliberation hardly to be found elsewhere than in peasant life or in the sphere of scholarly and dedicated people not in the least likely to make blouses. Women distracted by the incoherent interests of the modern town, or working at the rate necessary to make a living anywhere in the orbit of a modern town, will not have the experience to form the judgments about life which lie behind most of these embroideries, nor the time to practice the stitches and discover the principles of form and colour which make them strike the eye with the unity of flowers. A precisely similar process of degeneration can be seen in Tin Pan Alley, where the themes that are dealt with by folk-song and by the lyric poets are swallowed by shallow people in a hurry and immediately regurgitated in a repulsive condition.

But these old women, who looked at once hearty and tragic, who were able to grin broadly because early and profuse weeping had made their faces unusually mobile, were dealing in uncorrupted merchandise. All the embroidery had a meaning. The first I picked up had a gay little border to its hem, a line of suns with rays, half an inch across, with trees in between them and stars dancing above them. The suns had black centres and rays, and their circumferences were alternately orange and green, and the trees were alternately green and blue, and the stars were green and blue and brown. The design stood on a black line of stitching, under which were two broken lines of stitches in all these colours, and then there was a corded edge oversewn with buttonhole stitches in black, deep blue, light blue, crimson, green, and purple, with the black predominating so that there was an effect of darkness stirring with the colours of creation.

But the little suns and trees and stars would not take creation too seriously, it was as if fun was being poked at it. This significance was no fance of our own, for the woman who sold it to me and her friends smiled as they spread it out for us, and looked grave as they showed us one that was my second choice. On this some woman with a different temperament had given up her mind to thought of the majestic persistence of nature and its untender character, and had fixed on the linen a number of dark upright trees breaking into aloof flowers, harbouring indifferent birds. The design was so highly stylized as never to tempt the eye to mere gaping by its representation of fact; it refused to let the trees be more than symbols of a mood.

I found yet another design that was purely abstract. Bars and squares of black with raised designs and touches of purple in the solid background depicted no natural object whatsoever, yet evoked certain exaltations. It appears doubtful whether Tolstoy ever saw a peasant. In the imbecile work What is Art? he asserts that peasants appreciate only pictures which inculcate a moral lesson, such as, for example, a picture of a woman giving food to a beggar boy, and that only a person perverted by luxury can care for art which was created without a specific didactic aim. If he had put his head out of his window and looked at his own village, he would have seen — for embroidery of this kind is done, with varying degrees of merity, all the way up Eastern Europe from the Black Sea to the Baltic — that peasants, more than any other class in the modern community, persistently produce and appreciate art which is simply the presentation of pleasing forms. It was not improbably because Tolstoy was a bad man that he wished art to do nothing but tell him how to be good, and perhaps these peasant women can permit themselves their free and undidafctic art because their moral lives are firmly rooted.

They had been trodden into the dust by the Turks, condemned to hunger for food and to thirst for blood, but they had never forgotten the idea of magnificence, which is a valuable moral idea, for it implies that the duty of man is to make a superfluity beyond that which satisfies his animal needs and turns it to splendid uses.

I bought here a wedding dress perhaps twenty or thirty years old. It was a composite of eight garments, a fine chemise, a linen dress embroidered round the hem and sleeves till it was almost too heavy to be worn, a purple velvet waistcoat braided with silver, a sequin plastron to be worn over the womb as a feminine equivalent to a cod-piece, and a gauze veil embroidered in purple and gold. It was a memory of Byzantium and the Serbian Empire; solemnly it put sequins where the emperors and empresses had worn precious stones, it made of its wool and its flax and what it could buy from the pedlar something that dazzled the eyes a little as the Byzantine brocades had dazzled them much. Even so in the folk-songs of these parts do they sing with nostalgia of gold and silver, not as wealth, not as mintable material, but as glory to be used for shining ornament.

That they should remember glory, after they had been condemned for so long to be inglorious, is not to be taken for granted, as an achievement within the power of any in their place. A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people’s power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires. The Churches of Asia became extinct not because Islam threatened them with its sword, but because they were not philosophers enough to be interested in its doctrine nor lovers enough to be infatuated with the lovable throughout long centuries and in isolation.

But these Macedonians had liked to love as they had been taught by the apostles who had come to them from Byzantium, they had liked the lesson taught by the emperors that to wear purple and fine linen encourages human beings to differentiate themselves in all ways from the beasts, they had liked, even inordinately, the habit taught them by Byzantine art of examining life as they lived it and inquiring into their destiny as it overtook them; and since they had still their needles they turned to and managed to compress these strong likings into these small reflective and hieratic designs.

The old women were pleased at our enthusiasms.

They are of course not fully conscious of the part their embroideries play in the preservation of their ancient culture: when an Englishwoman plays a sonata by Purcell she is not likely to feel that she is maintaining English musical tradition. Yet these women are certainly aware that they are about some special business when they sew. I am told by an Englishwoman who has collected such embroideries for 20 years and knows their makers well that it is an esoteric craft, those who are expert in it do not give away their mystery. Many of the themes which often reappear in the designs have names and symbolic meanings which are not confided to strangers, and a woman will sometimes refuse to discuss the embroidery she has worked on a garment made for her own use. When they marry they make caps for their bridegrooms and about these they are always resolutely reserved.

Here is, indeed, another proof of the impossibility of history. There cannot be taken an inventory of time’s contents when some among the most precious are locked away in inaccessible parts and lose their essence when they are moved to any place where they are likely to be examined carefully, when their owners are ignorant of parts of their nature and keep secret such knowledge of them as they have.

Magnificent writing and observations.

who were able to grin broadly because early and profuse weeping had made their faces unusually mobile….

they had never forgotten the idea of magnificence, which is a valuable moral idea…