“The Mayan deity Ixchel is the goddess of weaving, medicine and childbirth.”

“In Santiago Atitlán (Guatemala), the weaving of the backstrap loom is ‘born’ while it’s ‘made’ on a treadle loom.”

“The praying mantis is one of the insects mostly frequently kept as pets.”

I’ve been cleaning out old files lately, and found a small box of file cards from the 1990s on which I scrawled down factoids from magazines and literary reviews, things I thought might go into my writing sometime, somewhere, or that I just found interesting.

All these things I wrote down and filed and forgot instantly. Now they’re in front of me again because of my ongoing project of organizing and culling, which is gaining headwind as the lockdown sails toward its fourth month. 

Baudelaire: “‘Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood regained at will.’”

“Picasso in Paris after WWII as he was led round a British Council show of children’s drawings: ‘When I was the age of these children, I could draw like Raphael. It took me many years to learn to draw like these children.’”

(Comedian Hannah Gadsby on Picasso during her show Nanette, which I finally got around to watching last week: ‘I hate him.’ But also, ‘Picasso was right…we could paint a better world if we learned how to see it from . . . as many perspectives as we possibly could.” And then again, Cubism was Picasso putting a ‘kaleidoscope filter on his dick.’)

From the Bible, the book of Micah, which Picasso doesn’t seem to have read: “’Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy god.’”

Then there’s Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark: “‘You know that I have always been an enemy to what is termed charity, because timid bigots endeavouring thus to cover their sins, do violence to justice, till, acting the demi-god, they forget that they are men. And there are others who do not even think of laying up a treasure in heaven, whose benevolence is merely tyranny in disguise. They assist the most worthless, because the most servile, and term them helpless only on proportion to their fawning.’”

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman: “‘To build the plot with small, almost imperceptible, suggestive details became a special component in…my filmmaking.’” 

More Bergman. “Don’t show horror in close-ups: ‘The sense of the horrible is reinforced by distance.’”

David Mamet: “‘As in our dreams, the law of psychic economy operates. In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious (rational) mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. 

“So with the drama, if the question is one which can be answered rationally, e.g.: how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect, our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete. 

“We feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.’” 

Another card: “Freud wrote that sensations of the uncanny were produced by an unexpected return of the repressed.”

I have no idea where most of these quotes came from, but some of them triggered thoughts that did make their way into my writing. The Freud quote made me think of a time late at night when I was driving home and smelled cigarette smoke in the car. I got the uncanny feeling that my father, a smoker, was in the seat beside me. More than that. He’d come by to wake me up when I was falling asleep at the wheel. 

What I was arguably repressing was the fact my difficult, wounded father had always tried to take care of me. That’s a more complex picture than I told myself for a long time, and something I wrote about in a travel memoir called Foreign Correspondences. 

Meanwhile: “In classical times in Asia Minor, Greeks would construct harps to leave outdoors so the wind played them.”

Alice Munro, interviewed on her taste in music during the Harbourfront Literary Festival: “I like bluegrass and Mozart.”

I scribbled that one down in a notebook at the time, very lucky to have got a ticket to the interview. Another Munro quote has lived for who-knows-how-long on a card: 

“‘The deep, personal matter of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.’”

Plus this from Toni Morrison, entirely apposite these days:

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.”