this book has gotten absolutely massive! it doesnt do anything remotely close to closing anymore nfjsjd. its REALLY hard taking pictures of pages and also pretty hard to work in especially if i pick a page close to the front or back. I understand now why many junk journalers and scrapbookers use something like a 3 ring binder. i would definitely do that if i could go back in time.
some detail close ups and messy ramble of an artist statment under the readmore:
I have been trying to make this piece and giving up and trying again for about five years.
the feeling i have been trying to express is so large and significant, i never felt like I could do it justice. And i still am not fully satisfied but I wanted something of it to finally exist.
When I was a child a read a story which has haunted me for something like a decade now, It went like this:
Once there lived a man and wife together in a little house. They loved eachother very much and lived happily until suddenly the wife fell gravely ill.
As she lay dying she told her beloved not to be sad or lonely because she would come back as a dove and sing for him every day. And the next morning she was gone.
The man waited and looked for a dove every day after, But she did not come back. Silence greeted him each morning.
The months passed by and the man brought home a new wife. Then on their very first morning together, he woke up to sound of a dove cooing at the window.
All day, every day she sang outside the windows of the little house. The couple became more and more upset by the dove and kept shooing it away, but she always came back the next morning.
Until finally they could stand it no longer and the husband reached for his hunting rifle up on the wall.
One last time he told the dove to go as he took aim, but she continued to sing for him.
And he fired
And a rose of red bloomed across her breast as the dove took flight, crying mournfully.
And as long as the man lived she never returned to the little house.
But they say to this day, a dove with a red stained breast still comes and perches on his grave.
I don't know how much of this is true to what i read and how much of it just how it twisted in my memory as thought of this story over and over. I could never understand why the man shot the dove. didnt he love her anymore?
but i remember the rose of red blooming across her breast. that line exactly has been burning in my mind ever since and how i know despite finding some similar folk tales, I've never found the version I read.
I don't remember where i read it. I have a memory of reading it as a standardized test in fourth grade. A multiple choice question. What did the author mean by " a rose of red bloomed across her breast". thats not the part I had questions about.
I have been thinking of this story over and over for so long this might just be a memory of a memory of where I thought i read it.
its such a dark story I cant really believe it was on a school test, even if that would explain why i cant find it since they always modify those stories for the tests. and so I wonder if maybe I read it in a book of ghost stories since since I read every single one in the school library back then.
and so for a while I took up collecting books of ghost stories and folk tales. hoping to find this story. hoping there was some detail i forgot that would make it make sense. why? why would he shoot the dove? why didnt he love her anymore?
so many terrible moments in my life I've thought of the dove wife. I've felt the rose burst out of my chest as i asked myself why? why ?why? I've wished I could fly away.
for a while i thought if i could find this story again, if i could understand why the husband shot the dove, I would be able to make sense of everything.
but now i think it hurts more when you understand why someone you love is hurting you. it hurts more when it makes perfect sense.
i wonder if the dove wife understood how she was only making her beloved unhappy and thats why she couldn't stop loving him even as he scorned her.
