WHEAT OR SNAKES [by Andrei Codrescu]

Shortly after the fall of the Romanian dictatorship in 1989, a friend of mine, the poet Ioana Ieronim, took me to see the Peasant Museum in Bucharest. It was a place full of folk art, displayed back then in the commie-pedagogic manner that consisted of long descriptive labels below items that defied their description. I was arrested by a beautiful "Tree of Life" rug woven by a peasant artist.

The motif is common to Turkish and Persian carpets, but the birds flying up and down here were specific to the Carpathian area. At the base of the tree two ripe wheat stalks held up the Biblical tree. I noted the resemblance to the forms Constantin Brancusi had borrowed from his native folklore, and the odd Napoleonic hats or half-worlds around black holes, at the end of decorative stalks. I kept talking about the rug as we headed back to my hotel through recently bombed ruins. Ioana called me the next day to tell me that the weaver was still alive and working in her village, though very old and nearly blind. I contacted her and asked if she could make a "Tree of Life" rug for me. She hesitated, but said "Yes, but it cost much money." "How much money is much money?" I asked her. After making complex calculations she replied after two days: "Three hundred dollars. It will be ready in one year." It was 1991. I agreed, paid her instantly, came back to America and promptly forgot about it. Two years later, in 1993, I received a letter from the weaver: "Do you want the wheat stalks at the bottom, or the traditional snakes?" Well, obviously, I wanted the traditional snakes. Where the Tree of Life comes from, snakes are major players. I didn't have to ask. I knew why she had replaced the snakes with wheat stalks: the Communist Party ordered her to. The Communist Party paid a great deal of attention to symbols: wheat represented well-being, bread, and optimism. Snakes were part of the communist bestiary of animals drafted in the service of rhetoric denouncing the evils of capitalism. We had monopolist hydras, capitalist pigs, speculator snakes, and saboteur worms.The Party countered this beastly world of squirming grossness with wheat, light, sweet breezes, and mighty dams over raging rivers. "Snakes, of course, snakes," I wrote back. The Bible (or folklore) didn't mince animals. Two years later, in 1995, I got the message that the rug was ready. Many historical things had taken place since I had first seen it. Several "democratic" governments had fallen. Demonstrations had been suppressed by the army. Capitalism, of the savage sort still active, had created a class of obscenely rich people who collected rugs among other things. The ex-Soviets plutocracy plucked the corpse of the State with vulturesque greed, like plutocracy everywhere. Unencumbered by wheat and related symbols, the New World Order went full snake. True to her word, my weaver, Elisabeta Murgu, very old and possibly totally blind by now, kept our bargain, even though, as she delicately put it: "my rugs have now become treasures given as gifts by our chief of state to the emperor of Japan and other important statesmen." I wasn't surprised. Her work was exceptional. All that remained was to convey the rug to me. I flew to Romania to pick it up myself. At the customs I was told that the rug was "national patrimony" and couldn't leave the country. The "Tree of Life," wheat or snakes, had its roots in place. For the next two years I made various appeals, official and unofficial, to get my rug. In 1999, a Romanian priest flew to California with his holy tools, to take charge of a congregation. The tools of his holy job, myrh, holy oils, censers, bells, icons, etc, were wrapped in my "Tree of Life" rug. Shipping it to me was a breeze. In 2000 UPS delivered the rug. It was everything I hoped for: its flying red birds lit up the house, and its snakes squirmed with delighted wisdom at the roots. Like the emperor of Japan and Girard d'Estaing I displayed it proudly in my palace, now a studio in Queens. Actually, there is no wall room for it in my studio in Queens. There may be room for it on a future wall. It's a flying carpet, it likes to take its time.

 

 

Comments

[carmen firan]

Beautiful!

[Bob Holman]

Exhibition, please! (tea, maybe?)