ACTS OF RESISTANCE
[CW: this essay begins lightly but eventually moves towards difficult places that reference children and war. You will have time to decide whether to continue reading, and I’ve placed a single dividing line at the turn.]
I’ve taken my impatient hand to mending things again. First it took me half an hour to find my knitting bags, which I had moved not a few days earlier. (Every project in our house is preceded by somewhere between ten and a thousand minutes of stomping on old creaky stairs, opening and slamming squeaky, rattling doors, and cursing to eternal torture the lack of storage in our charming little rat-hole.)
I kept cruising past the place where the bags were sitting, obvious and lopsided on the floor. I drooled a little and gazed at the hooks on the wall right above them, where I really thought I’d put them, limply hoping the wallpaper would warp and bubble and reconfigure like a Magic Eye challenge, and suddenly spit them out after all, haha, just kidding, life isn’t quite that stupid.
This is the first rule of losing your marbles: they aren’t lost, they’re almost exactly where you thought they were, but always with a slight twist, a troubled little rustling depth— that thing you’d forgotten about yourself, the self in the moment when your awareness diverged from the task at hand.
Usually, I find, it’s a somewhat tasty little morsel, not unkind, like my vague hope that I’d have an easier time gathering up the fiber-vomiting bags from the floor than untangling them from other bags on the wall hooks. It was a saccade of mild self-kindness that prompted me to pile my own bags in an unusual place (and then lose track of them there).
Perhaps we don’t become forgetful so much as we become a little softer around the edges, more forgiving. So returning to that more pliable place, instead of searching with the fury of the gods, is likely to help you find the damn thing.
Soften, widen. Let the chin descend, the breath subside, and there! Now your eyes can come to rest on them— plopped on the floor, leaning into each other, those two canvas shopping bags hemorrhaging knots and loops of sixteen different yarns onto each other and the surrounding entryway-turned-closet-on-account-of-good-god-we-really-still-haven’t-built-any-stairs.
The mending itself interests me so much. It feels like an act of resistance, a quiet and contained way to yes possibly possibly possibly stay the hand of entropy for another short while, but also maybe do a super-fancy judo move on it, taking some of its strands— deterioration, the flow of forms and shapes, layers of time and intent, familiarity and surprise, the gathering that can only occur because there was a dispersal to begin with— and weaving them inward, forward, towards themselves and each other, so that they become another iteration of the mortal unit’s beauty.
This all works out, of course, to a somewhat gruesome wad of that asshole yarn your aunt gave you (basically jettisoned out her car window in a furious drive-by unburdening, which you now understand, the stuff has been so impossibly irascible in every project you’ve tried it on), globbed onto the blown-out and now moth-eaten hem of one of your husband’s third-tier sweaters. Truly it is a handmade bramble “only a mother” could love, by which I think we probably mean to say anyone who has suffered.
Which brings me to the place I needed to come.
When, in our world, someone’s child is killing someone’s child—unmaking, in the force of a blow, an entity so miraculous we ourselves would end, would vaporize without thought if that would save it, and yet our ending would supply no help—
Then, I suppose, we remain.
When we entities string one moment into another into years of this remaining, when we persist, we become subject to deconstruction and dissolution ourselves. We become the sweater, assaulted from both the inside and the outside, injured by consuming moths and fiber-splitting yard-work alike.
I can think of little else, as we pull apart, from each other and ourselves, but the work of mending. The entirely imperfect, knotted, layered, futile, necessary, small and striking work.
Find the injuries. Trace their edges. Choose a color. Thread the needle. Pierce the fabric. Draw the fiber through.
When you’ve made a row of these soft and pliable planks, start in from the other direction. Cross-hatch what you’ve already done, going under where before you had gone over.
Make as many passes as your needle’s width allows, or your yarn’s length.
Tie a knot that will hold, but not too tightly, because you might need to slip or ease it someday soon.
Close it, for now, with a fixture that lets it all move in a single plane, the rent fabric together with the space you’ve filled using whatever godforsaken materials you have.
Build a small span, one that will join a thing to another thing, for a while. It is a made place. It lets them stay with us, against our skin, for this one more day, at least.
Thank you for this. These are beautiful and important words at a time when too many of us are struggling with the painful reality that ultimately military solutions are no replacement for political solutions, and durable solutions are built upon the firm principle that especially when the world seems intent on mutual destruction it is in those moments that we must draw upon our shared responsibility to center our collective humanity because our very existence depends upon it. Peace. Love. Mending.
In such dark times in which we find ourselves, clinging to a hope that somehow humanity will come to its senses, seems ridiculous. But I'll choose to be radically ridiculous anyway. I'm not sure what that will accomplish, but at least I'll bring that attitude to my local context in the midst of my lament for the pain of the world and all those miraculous images of God out there. "Rend your hearts and not your garments" sounds wise, and often it is. Yet, sometimes, all we can do is mend our garments. That too has its wisdom and can participate in eternity.