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Date Created
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2024
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Description
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My final piece for the course was to set up a display for the pop-up art show, designed to (hopefully) create a sense of intimacy and reflection for the viewer, a drawing in. I used a battered old trunk found at the side of the road some years ago, along with a lamp and an antique wooden chair to create the look of a bedside table – or a place of waiting, or perhaps even an altar (all interpretations work well with my chosen text). The trunk stands for travel (of course); I was hoping to evoke a feeling of a journey, a departure, or just waiting in Grand Central Station when your beloved has forgotten to pick you up. The lampshade, a wine-coloured velvet with a raised floral pattern, reminds me of the novella’s theme of bloodletting (blood sacrament). Scattered abalone shells represent Big Sur, California, where Smart’s affair with George Barker began. The shells have a weathered exterior, but when you flip them to look inside there are delicate, iridescent lines that look like waves approaching the shore. The Bible is cracked open to the Song of Songs. My two paper crafts, “Kelp in Amorous Coils Pin Down the Pacific” and “When Your House is on Fire,” are also featured in the display. Smart’s prose is raw (and demanding) in her exploration of love, loss, and longing – obliging the same from me when I attempted to engage with the text through crafted forms. The materials I used – shells, torn paper, and discarded objects – (hopefully) reflect the text’s fragmented, raw, and vulnerable interior.
ML PRENGER ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US:
The novella By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept was first published in 1945 by Editions Poetry London (a small press). It did not come in like a lion: there was not much fuss around the book then, and only 2,000 copies were printed. It was not until the book was republished in the 1960s that it started gathering more attention. It has always been a polarizing work, for different reasons at the time of initial publication than readers might find today. I have read multiple reviews from modern readers who call it out for being the stuff of teenage girls’ diaries (gushing). I believe the cultural context of the time is critical to consider. It was written at a time of anti-adultery laws, but also at a time when being homosexual was considered criminal. Both Smart and Barker were bisexual and were involved in an extra-marital affair. In the novella, Barker confesses to Smart about a passionate encounter with a young man, a “blonde-sapling” with “blue eyeshadow” (78), in the backroom of a print shop; Smart’s response is one of regret that she cannot turn herself into a “printshop boy with armpits like chalices”(8). Smart not only confessed to criminal offences, but she had them published. Her mother raced to have the book banned in Canada, burning all the copies she could get her hands on. Smart describes her mother as having a “clutch [that] held me in every way, with claws of biology and pity and hysterical hypnotism, and made me long for my annihilation. Can even Freud explain the terror of that clutch?” (69).
Through Smart’s double use of scripture as both inspiration and shield, the novella’s connection to the Bible, particularly Song of Songs (but also Psalm 137—“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”), speaks to the broader tension of the time (which is newly relevant again today, one could argue) when religion and morality were wielded to enforce cultural conformity. Smart’s work subverts the sacred text, reclaiming scripture to validate her love and suffering and using it as a shield to defend herself.
When I read this book for the first time, I was in my 20s and (at that time) an evangelical Christian. I was also a closeted bisexual (leaning more towards lesbian) and unable to live an authentic life out of fear of rejection and eternal punishment (yes, hell). I was madly in love with a woman, but we were both too scared to talk about it openly because we both came from religious homes. This was the late 90s/early 2000s, and while people were not imprisoned in Canada for same-sex relations, same-sex marriage was still not legal, a fact that confirmed (for me) that there might be something wrong with me. I cracked open this book for a Canadian literature course and was both horrified and mesmerized by Smart’s blasphemy. It was beautiful (I was always a fan of Song of Songs), and it unlocked me. I was already set in motion to release myself from the noose of religion at the time, but Smart allowed me to fully cut the umbilical cord from whatever held me in its clutch. Love is love (we understand this now), but, in 2000, it still didn’t feel that way (for me). But Smart had recognized her truth and, decades before (I was born), declared it to the world. Reading her work again 25 years later, I am still inspired by Smart’s courage. Her novella is about love – messy, painful, and forbidden. My crafted projects allowed me to physically work with the visceral elements of this novel, to take her story and my own and fold, tear, and twist them together to explore that painful (universal) experience of love, loss, and longing.