Purple Rain and Lavender Pillows

As artist I thrive on the leaps and bounds of my imagination. And yet, sometimes I feel awkward exposing my crazy, excited self to the rest of the world, especially when I see a brow lift just a bit or when a mouth forms a question, stops halfway, and resorts to a smile. This makes me think my friends pretend to believe talking to flying teddy bears is normal. It makes me want to defend the hows and whys of my preoccupations.

It is difficult to explain the spinning and swirling of words, their search for images, for memories, for innovative expression – the sudden burst of multi-media visions. The show usually begins early in the morning. I am awake but haven’t opened my eyelids yet. A bird might be sending a message from the garden. A few heavy raindrops might drum on the metal roof of the carport. Or a ray of sunshine might squeeze between the slats of the blinds and tempt my tightly shut eyes. First mental connections are easily interrupted by the demands of reality and half-formed thoughts scramble back into the underbrush. But eventually I am done editing the movie in my head and jump out of bed. Quickly I perform all the tasks required prior to greeting the oatmeal box and the coffee pot. Once my breakfast and I have landed in front of the computer a synthesized color-texture-word-image experience is beginning to form. It might only take one sitting, but more often I “brood before I breed.” I might have to retake photographs, knit another bear, scrap an idea, keep my eyes closed through a few more mornings of prefabrication.

“So, what’s up with the purple rain and lavender pillow theme?” My imaginary shrink looks over my shoulder. “Where did that come from?”

I click on a list to show him. Yarn balls in various shades of purple. Prince song title. Rainer Maria Rilke poem. Window. Beads of rain. The meaning of the color purple. Pain. Overcoming pain.

“You see,” I start, “when I looked at all the different shades of purple on the table I hummed “purple rain, purple rain, I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain.” Then I noticed the difference between deep purple and lavender. As if something had softened the stronger color. A line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem about Mary’s Death popped into my mind. I read the poem again. I own it in German only and don’t dare translate it in verse form. I love Rilke’s poems, but they are very difficult to translate.

Rilke says that Mary was like a lavender pillow (in English we call it potpourri) buried for a while, so the earth would pick up her scent in its folds, like a fine piece of cloth, and death and sickness would be eased by her fragrance.

This morning, in bed, when the first drops of rain fell, I imagined them to be purple. I saw teddy bears, dressed in shades of purple, looking through a window, beyond the beads of purple rain. And they sat on fluffy lavender colored pillows. When the rain stopped only one streak of purple beads was left, meandering between the flowers.

Translate this into a bunch of bears sitting on a pile of yarn, a piece of glass in front of them dripping purple water color paint. Now I’ve got to figure out how to make this happen. In the meantime….testing, testing … one, two, three……….see Bear number thirteen climbing the yarn as stand-in for his future brothers and sisters of the Purple Rain.”

My shrink frowns and finishes our conversation with, “Whatever that means!”