BY HAND

……………………………………………………….

writers’ musings:

“Don’t write about yourself. You aren’t as interesting as you think.” Tracy Chevalier

……………………………………………………….

BY HAND

Maybe beads or buttons. Perhaps cross-stitching or warp and weft, bouclés, carpet yarns. Then there is finger-weight and sports-weight… oh, and baby yarn. Cashmere, perhaps. Merino, certainly. Silk! What about silk! Hmmm. Doesn’t really last – it’s pure ephemera. Not so ephemeral as smoke, oh no, but it isn’t wont to stay around as long as cotton might, or linen. Wool doesn‘t last either. Silk and wool: not comparable, though. One is one, the other is the other. But something made from silk and wool is something enhanced, a synergy. And think of the colors! The natural dyes: cochineal, madder, indigo… ah, indigo! An entire universe contained therein. Indigo is even the color of the universe. Nowadays, aniline dyes and synthetics deliver untold gradations, variations.

Cotton. Grown and harvested brutally until the advent of the cotton gin. Now vicious empires of technology and capitalism have engineered doing away with the age-old commodities of wool, silk, cotton, and linen. Crude is necessary for the synthetics.

Linen: why is it so beloved? Coarse or fine, stiff or soft, slubbed or smooth, washed or new. Linen seems to eat color; it swallows it, subsumes color into its essence as it digests it, then dulls it and finally fades. Usually and unusually beautiful. Those other sister fibres of this earth, the cottons, wools, silks, take color in and radiate it outwards at least for a long while before dulling and fading.

And just consider the primitive miracle of spinning, of knitting, of weaving. Knitting came first, creating whole cloth from a single fibre, a single thread. Stitching, embroidering, embellishing… Don’t leave anything just plain, unless you are cowed by your church and believe that you, the ordinary soul, don’t deserve any color or detail; only the lofty ones can gild and embellish their robes and vestments, such as the ones the Pope wears – or even lowly bishops, full of cutwork and gold work, thread that has been ennobled by anything metallic, applied with devout and devoted hands, hands, hands. The fingers of millennia.

Or decorate with feathers as the Incas did. Use beads, shells, buttons. The Blood of the Mestizo… . Go to Indonesia: see those wild knots tied into the warp before dyeing and… out comes ikat. The paisleys of India, woven, printed… Persian carpets…………

And braids, ribbons, lace… Lace!! Ever see those crones in Belgium who would sit with those boards and pins winding fine thread through untold patterns of lacemaking for the tourists who like the nostalgia of that craft, pinwheels of florals, of birds, of spirals, fans, scallops, whatnot. Consider the cultivation of the mulberry worm and that natural industry of silk-making for la Gloire de la France… ONCE for France, now for Costco, once eternally moving all of it along the Silk Road, or by barge along the Volga or the Neva, across the Indian Ocean or the Atlas Mountains. Good God. It’s the sum of what is civilized: jacquards, damasks, plaids, worsteds, what variation, what abundance! 10,000 Gordian knots in carpets for a Bedouin’s tent… Ottoman divans all covered in embroidered textiles… Consider again the rich purple of the robes of ecclesiasts, or perhaps just remember a pink sweater-set from the 1950s with faux pearl buttons, and then put on the great equalizer: your sweats and your hoodie to head out the door. From Lululemon if you’re flush. From Walmart if you’re not.

…………………………………………………………….

Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid

……………………………………………………………….