The afternoon is fading, the brilliant north light vanishing from the studio. Grace and I replace our coffees with scotch. We remain silent for a bit in the gathering darkness. Then Grace lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, and says:

“I guess I’m an old-fashioned ideologue. For me, discipline is freedom, ideology is specific, organization is crucial. Without these tools, these structural means, I don’t know how to perform or produce. I sense that there is a new world out there, a new and important idea forming itself, perhaps even a new step in the human struggle is being taken with this cry of ‘consciousness.’ I sense it, but I don’t feel it. It doesn’t speak to me in my gut. It doesn’t give me new sight. . . . So I make my quilts and my pots. Here in the studio I fashion a kind of structure I understand and within which I can function. And that’s it. That’s how an ideologue without an ideology goes on.”