puzzling

So my coping and calming device just now is wooden jigsaw puzzles. I like the feel of a nice fat puzzle piece chunking into place. I like to commune with the picture, dreamily. I like that moment when an impossible piece from some other puzzle fits in, when a frustratingly unfillable gap was always that nondescript piece lurking on the margins. And I love reversing entropy. I spent much of my adolescence doing classic Springbok puzzles—May from the Très Riches Heures, a Chinese plate, and above all this one of a princely tabletop in pietre dure (inlaid semi-precious stones):



I so love the idea of flowers caught in china caught in stone caught in laminated cardboard, shattered and remade. And when a few years ago I hunted down that real table in Florence, I squee’d!

But I always wanted a real wooden jigsaw puzzle. I think the first one that I saw was a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party belonging to my cousins’ inimical aunt, which I wasn’t allowed to play with. That yearning went into Moonwise:

In a lower drawer, they found plain cardboard boxes, spilling wooden jigsaw puzzles. "Woodspells," said Craobh. Spells? Ariane remembered scenes of woolly innocence: the tabbied sleep of cottages amid their gardens; children bringing May; huntsmen on horses brown as gingernuts; sheepfolds and hayfields, with lads and lasses in their garlands of straw.Yet within the painted images were hidden shapes of wood, much loved: trees, stars, and crescent moons; a pair of spectacles amid the thatch; a teapot daubed with cloud; a child in the standing grass; a scythe; a ship caught in flowering thorn; a goose of reynard-colored sky; a cup in a hazel-copse; a sprawling hare, haunched with nightfall; a swan tumbled in a countrywoman's apron; a hunchback with a bundle of wood, whose nose Thos had broken. He'd filched other pieces for his games. Ariane remembered the oilcloth, owl-shaped scar among the sheep. When the puzzles were done, they were tenacious, hooked and barbed and burred, as delicately intricate as thistleseed: you could pick them up and shake them before they tumbled into atomies. Craobh turned these over and over, as if they were a text in some archaic tongue, the linear A of woods: not for their babbling prose, but analytically, for their grammar. Unravelled, it might weave for her.And now I own wooden jigsaw puzzles—sound English Wentworths and two dazzling Libertys—but until now I’ve lacked time and tables. Well, I do have tables at home, but they’re all groaning under a burden of unsorted books and papers. When I started sheltering here, gaudior had the brilliant idea of using the under-futon drawers to puzzle on, and sliding them away at night, safe from the curiosity of cats and child. So I brought my two Liberty puzzles, as yet untried: Botticelli’s Primavera:






and Burne Jones’s The Days of Creation.






That latter was my own special order, as I’ve loved those angels since I first saw them back in 1969. Alas, there are only five now, as “the Fourth Day was cut from its frame during a dinner party in Dunster House at Harvard University in 1970 where the entire series on loan from the Fogg Art Museum. It has never been recovered.” We have Oscar Wilde’s description of it, which is tantalizing: “In the fourth compartment are four angels, and the crystal glows like a heated opal, for within it the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars is passing.” It has been restored by William Morris Tile, but I couldn’t find a large enough digital file for puzzle reproduction.

And now I want this for my bathroom.

Those two made me happy for weeks. I usually finish all the boring backgrounds before rewarding myself with the prettiest things, but these puzzles coalesce around the thematic “whimsies”: the Sagittarius among the oranges of the Hesperides, the unicorn in Chloris’ lap, the lutanist playing in Mercury’s head, the trumpeting angel in the Zephyr’s, the lovely interlaced knot, like the soundhole of a lute, that ties Venus to Flora and the nearest Grace.



The puzzle folks didn’t design a special cut for the Burne Jones, so the whimsies aren’t as integral. That’s a pity: I would have islanded each sphere, inlaid suns, moons, stars, creatures of the sea and earth, an Adam and an Eve. . .But there’s a lovely inlaid ballet, all in feathered tutus.

And then I finished.

The Liberty puzzles had spoiled me for Wentworth, even my beloved Hunters in the Snow: the pieces are thinner, the shapes less extravagant, the whimsies less whimsical.

So I spent a week wistfully eyeing the Liberty website—isn’t this the most Nine-colored picture?



—and obsessively alphabetizing all of my hosts’ fiction. Because entropy.

Then Liberty cautiously reopened, bless them. They’re taking only as many orders as they can make in a sparsely peopled workspace (they’re good at spatial). I trust them not to endanger their staff. Demand, as you might imagine, is fierce. They come online at 10 am MDT sharp. By 10:02, they’re sold out. So frustrating: you jump all the hoops, click Purchase—and your cart reverts to empty.

But at last, I got lucky! I have reserved two puzzles.

For meditation, this beloved Vermeer, the first I ever saw and was entranced with, before it was stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. My heart breaks every time I walk into that room and see the empty space.



And for challenge, this astonishing Hunt (Diana and Her Nymphs), which is two puzzles in one. The original is by Robert Burns (no, not that one: Scottish Art Nouveau), from a mural painted for Crawford’s tearoom in Edinburgh, c. 1926. It puts me in mind of Hippolyta.





And that image can be tesseracted into a stag’s head:



Back to casting spells with time and space.

And I have an apprentice.  As it turned out, Fox was fascinated enough to be careful, and fortuitously singled out some useful pieces (“Where does this one go?). He’s a born puzzler! Having mastered twelve-piece puzzles in no time at all, he tore into a 51-piece floor puzzle of a glittery Unspecified Theropod* with imbedded dinosaurs (“He swallowed them”), and has roared on to a Giganotosaurus on my iMac. Who taught him to mouse? He picked up drag and drop as if by instinct. And surprisingly often, he doesn’t just shuffle around, but studies the field and pounces. Click!

Nine


* rushthatspeaks  : “Unspecified Theropod? Didn’t they open for Ani DiFranco in 1989?”