Wednesday, October 24, 2012

My Mother's Red Shawl - El Rebozo Colorado
Colin MacDonald - Saxophonist/Composer







Rebozo draped over my shoulders, warming my skin in the coolness of the house. The rough wool is heavy and textured, from a time when people made things by hand.

Alex says, "You are in an exclusive club now. The Red Shawl Club." We are all woven together under the magic eye of his camera lens, our blood red lives frozen in a moment of time.

How many others have been touched by this fabric, how many more will join the club? What invisible threads have led me here, like Ariadne's cord guiding me safely through the maze?

Over time and across space, Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem binds us together, entangling our unseen quanta in the sticky webs of life. Like the Śrīvatsa engraved on my wedding band reminds me, our messy macroscopic selves stick together like tar babies, through love and hate, memory, dream, and fantasy.

Over land and sea the rebozo travelled from Mexico to Argentina, and eventually here to Vancouver. All those who touched it left an impression, helped it on its journey to reach my shoulders.

Redness shines forth from it, the dye it carries absorbing all colour but for that shade which it reflects back into my eyes, the tint of fresh blood now over my skin, but also within me.

King scale crimson, Homer's wine-dark sea, blood of the great mother that birthed the universe. The secret river carrying DNA messages through eternity, ferrying molecules of oxygen, glucose, serotonin, dopamine, endorphin, food for thoughts, giving rise to self-consciousness, becoming electrical activity carried mimetically from one brain and body to another.

"Hands reveal much about persons," Alex tells me. The hands of this tool-using primate are smooth and manicured, muscled for precise movements on the instrument of my choice, and bear the emblems of my devotion to my wife. I hold them crossed, right over left, in a sign of secret Art.

Under the rebozo we all sit: musician, dancer, writer, actor, butcher, baker, candlestick-maker, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. I imagine the red shawl growing, weaving itself longer and larger to cover the city, the country, wrapping the entire planet until every man, woman, and child is protected and preserved in its embrace.

I perch on the chair and face into the camera lens, as curious to see myself as to know how the photographer sees me. Will I recognize myself, or does my memory of my face come from another place and time?

Time is captured, fixed in the photograph's plate, this moment never to reappear, yet forming another vibrating strand in the web of reality. If I lift my arm, and slide over a little in the frame, I think there's room enough for you too, dear Reader.


André De Mondo Wanderer
Nina Gouveia Yoga Instructor
Stacey Hutton Excercise Physiologist
Colleen Wheeler Actor
Sarah Rodgers Actor, Director,Mother
Timothy Turner - Real Estate Agent
Kiera Hill Dancer
Johnna Wright & Sascha Director/Mother - Son/Dreamer
Decker & Nick Hunt Cat & 19th century amateur
George Bowering Poet
Celia Duthie Gallerist
Linda Lorenzo Mother
Katheryn Petersen Accordionist
Stefanie Denz Artist
Ivette Hernández Actress
Byron Chief-Moon Actor/Dancer
Colin Horricks Doctor
Ian Mulgrew Vancouver Sun Columnist
Jocelyn Morlock Composer
Corinne McConchie Librarian
Rachel Ditor Dramaturg
Patrick Reid Statesman, Flag Designer
Michael Varga CBC Cameraman
Bronwen Marsden Playwright/Actress/Director
David Baines Vancouver Sun Columnist
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward Photographer
Lauren Elizabeth Stewart Student
Sandrine Cassini Dancer/Choreographer
Meredith Kalaman Dancer/Choreographer
Juliya Kate Dominatrix