String Theory

It's not an original title, any more than it's an original idea, but it's something I feel compelled to address in this space because it has a lot to do with everything else here...

Yesterday I was mousing around in some old writings and was a little surprised by how many words I found having to do with cloth or fabric, in one sense or another. Although I have some skill with knots and strings, and I've dabbled with them for many years--in the forms of macrame, crochet, knitting, sewing, weaving by loom and by hand (on and off-grid) and others--I hardly regard myself as a craftsperson, so it was somewhat illuminating to see that particular thread running through my thoughts... of knots and loops, looming questions, lives and thoughts woven, raveling, tapestries and dropped stitches...Once you come to know these words through your hands, they take on a different meaning. Felt is not just an emotion or a sensation, it's an act of transformation.

Years ago I read what I thought at the time and still believe to be an important work by a woman named Mary Daly, titled Gyn/Ecology. It's a book that many people might find intolerable, not merely because of its lesbian-feminist slant but because the language she uses is almost confrontational, spinning words in a way we're not used to, suggesting (for example, one I can remember) that the use of the term 'coupling' to describe activity between the Space Shuttle and the Space Station might be understood as a sort of way of fucking (in) outer space. Some people get off on that idea; others would prefer to know the Moon from Earth, and don't have to go stick something in it just to prove it's better than cheese. But I digress... The point here is that this book (which, incidentally, I loaned to a good friend of mine who never returned it and is now dead, so I may never see it again) really changed the way I thought about language, made me think a little harder and more deeply about all these words and how they're used, how they come into the lexicon and penetrate our minds, whether we like it or not (btw, David Foster Wallace wrote a great piece called Tense Present having to do with lexicons) and maybe it wasn't actually even her book that got me thinking about spinning, so much as few others (Starhawk, maybe, or Women Who Run With the Wolves) but whoever it was made an impact. The whole Universe spins: threads, yarns, records...and from these, it warps, wefts and weaves the Fabric of the Cosmos, man...

But what was the point of all this? Oh, yeah, I was out on the World Wide Web tonight and happened across this TED talk having to do with coral reefs, crochet and mathematics, and the difference between an idea and its manifestation...




There are long and twisted threads which form the ties that bind my grandmother's tablecloths to strands of DNA. You don't have to understand any of that to be able to knit a really cool sweater but you do have to know the pattern... and considering that a serious number of people don't know how to sew a button on their own pants, I think we should all give the knitters, knotters, spinners and weavers some appreciation for the patterns they've seen, and made real.

patterning piece

I was out this evening, half-walking half-running around and on my way back into the neighborhood when I started questioning why it is that I and we admire these industrial landscapes so much, and it struck me that there's something appealing about the patterns they repeat, such simple ones, so easy to comprehend--lines, squares, grids, boxes--and the structures these patterns create, so defiant of Death (and Life, by turn), impervious to pain, untouched by suffering... Good God y'all, do we Really Live Here? I mean, sure, it might blow your mind to truly examine a pitcher plant, or see a spider, or know what water is, but I mean Jesus Christ People, don't we know the goddamn difference?