The Joseph Riipi has written a most beautiful book, and we always find it interesting when we find ourselves talking beauty and death in the same moment or thought. On the face it, it should all be more contradictory than that. Of course, this is one of the many things art does for us, be it literature, paintings, movies, theater, or dance, it takes our tortured, at times unknowable feelings and reflects them back to us in ways that are beautiful if not still unsettling and confusing. It is in this reflection though, this funhouse mirror, and again the contradictions abound, where beauty is found, and it is in reflection that Riipi's A Cloth House resides. This is a book about making sense of death, but more than that it is about feeling and memory, and how these things intersect and morph into one another to form a narrative. It is touch and smell and missing pieces slowly fit together. Tragedy as confusion seeking to be understood. And fragmentary scenes from a life slowly piling on top of another as they build and sort themselves out into something that almost makes sense so many years later.
Whereas the Joseph Riipi talks Legs Get Led Astray with Chloe Caldwell at The Lit Pub.
JR: One of my favorite moments in the book is in “That Was Called Love,”
a kind of love letter to New York City from Seattle, when you write:
“Last night I described New York to a rock climber in Seattle. ‘It
sounds like, New York is for you, what the mountains are for me.’” Since
then you’ve moved back to New York (but now just outside the city).
Have you found for yourself a permanent mountain?
CC: No. I think “mountains” or “homes” are
specific to what you need at that time in your life. For a long time, I
truly did think you could count on a place to make you happy. Like, when
I moved to New York City, I was young and so affected by it that I
thought it was alive. Now I see that just like people — there is not one
person or place that you can get everything you want from. It’s all
about compromise. If I could mix my mother’s backyard, Brooklyn, and
Portland together, that would be a pretty sweet home. When I left the
city to move to Washington, I thought that Seattle would be as new and
exciting. But it was far from it and for a while, that was hard for me
to cope with and accept. It’s like this quote by Fran Lebowitz: “When
you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the
world is. Clean is not enough.”
