Unraveled, Mended, Unraveled, Mended

     "From a needlework book, I learned to cast on.  In the test piece, I got the gauge and correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally, as though my fingers had been rubbed in spiderwebs at birth.  The sliding of the needles was as rhythmic as water.
     Learning to knit was the obvious thing.  The separation of tangled threads, the working-together of raveled ends into something tangible and whole--this mending was as confounding as the groom who drives into a stop sign on the way to his wedding.  Because symptoms mean just what they are.  What about the woman whose empty hand won't close because she cannot grasp that her child is gone? 
      [...]
     Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.
     Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat."

---Amy Hempel, "Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep"

In this story, knitting is a metaphor for the narrator's painful feelings of loss following an abortion--a symbol of her attempts at self-repair.  Knitting fascinates the narrator for its "compression of language into code," the shorthand instructions that only she and  others who study the craft can comprehend.   

Yet knitting is not merely a motif for loss within this story.  The knitting patterns  or "codes" also capture in microcosm the work of the short story itself---its compression and encoding of the human experience, line by line.  In the course of the story, not only yarn, but hair, pasta primavera, and tinsel, become fodder for the narrator's obsession with knitting. "That was the great thing about knitting," the narrator observes, "everything is fiber, the world a world of natural resources."  Similarly, ordinary happenings and tragedies alike become the substance of fiction which captures human unraveling at its darkest moments, yet also offers the glimmer of the possibility of wholeness (however piecemeal) as do the final lines of Hempel's story:

"K tog rem st.  Knit together remaining stitches. 
Cast off loosely." 

Thus the story is hardly limited by its subject matter.   Fiction compresses and encodes life--- the patterns are recognizable. 

Let The Air In

"I said the mountains looked like white elephants.  Wasn't that bright?"

"That was bright."

"I wanted to try this new drink.  That's all we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks?"

"I guess so."

The girl looked across at the hills.

"They're lovely hills," she said.  "They don't really look like white elephants.  I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees."

"Should we have another drink?"

"All right."

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.

"It's lovely," the girl said.

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."

"Then what will we do afterward?"

"We'll be fine afterward.  Just like we were before."

"What makes you think so?"

"That's the only thing that bothers us.  It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

"And you think then we'll be all right and be happy."

"I know we will. You don't have to be afraid.  I've known lots of people that have done it."

"So have I," said the girl.  "And afterward they were all so happy."

"Well," the man said, "if you want to you don't have to.  I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple."

"And you really want to?"

"I think it's the best thing to do.  But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to."

"And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?"

"I love you now.  You know I love you."

"I know.  But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"

---Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

It isn't the unnamed operation that is the subject matter of this quote that interests me, but its painful recognition of the ephemerality of any moment of well-being or balance.  That desire to return and recapture an earlier idealized state--things "like they were"--  is universal.  Flinging open the window, or here in this passage, "let[ting] the air in" in the more clinical sense, seems to promise to end stuffiness, to restore simplicity and clarity.  The girl knows better.  Returning to the ideal state once the line has been crossed is a near impossiblity.