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. 

One Delicious Compound

We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us...we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

---Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 "On Gathering Ideas"

Seneca discusses the art of commonplacing and the alchemy of composition.  His words reassure the shaky and insecure young writer that although he/she gathers pollen (quotes) from flowers (the writing of other authors) the "honey" he/she produces from this raw material will indeed be something new--and more importantly, something delicious. 

[Note Seneca's  reference to the word care in this quote.  The word care and the word curate have the same root. To care for something is to preserve or maintain--but it also suggests selection, arrangement, and exhibition. Thus copying quotes is not meant to be a derivative act but a generative one--much as a museum exhibition makes a new argument through the presentation of pre-existing objects, so too do authors produce new ideas by drawing upon those already in existence. ]

Form

Edward Said reminds us that form conveys content and in so doing prompts reflection on modern day reading habits. A culture of skimming--indeed, a culture which tends to gut sources simply for simple "facts"--overlooks the importance of the media form itself in conveying the message.

"The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at [...] In Kanafani's Men in the Sun much of the action takes place on the dusty streets of an Iraqi town where three Palestinian men must petition, plead, and bargain with "specialists" to smuggle them across the border into Kuwait. Impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinians need to carve a path for themselves in existence, which for them is by no means a given or stable reality. Like the history of the lands they left, their lives seem interrupted just before they could come to maturity and satisfaction; thus each man leaves behind family and responsibilities, to whose exigencies he must answer--unsuccessfully--here in the present. Kanafani's very sentences express instability and fluctuation--the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another--in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished framgent of the past. Thus, the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other.
     Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations."

---Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)

Material Things

In this superb collection edited by Gary Schmidgall (sort of a commonplace book of Whitman) we begin to understand the deeper impact of everyday material things on the act of composition:

Whitman explains his preference for Mammoth Falcon quill pens: "I find I get to like the vast pens: they give me something to take hold of: they encourage me to write spacious things. There's a spiritual side: more than that: a spiritual outcome." A few days later: "it makes a great difference what sort of pen...I am sensitive--I especially hate the little bits of pens--the dwarf ladylike pens: I don't seem to be able to do anything fullsized with them: they interfere with my ideas--break my spirit."

---Taken from Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892, Edited by Gary Schmidgall.

On Creativity

Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the result of the remodeling, however useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive one.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology

On the alchemy of composition

The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with pieces borrowed from others, he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

--Michel de Montaigne, Essais, "Of the education of children."