I remember thinking two things in junior high Home Ec: 1) these recipes are stupid, and 2) this sewing machine might kill me.
When it came to muffins, I was an estimable person among 11-year-olds, certain that measuring cups were for the meek. When it came time to sew a cartoon whale-shaped pillow, however, the terror and shame at my obvious mortality were enough to make me feign fevers and spend aimless, shaky, guilt-ridden hours at the nurse’s office on a cold vinyl bed, staring at the stains in the drop-ceiling panels. I couldn’t bear jamming one more sewing machine— which unfailingly caused the instructor to stop what she was doing and spend many fraught minutes in front of all the other children un-jamming my pillow-in-progress from what looked like a mass of blackberry brambles beneath the machine’s nasty maw.
Apparently I had already begun to deduce that “always there will be greater and lesser persons than [my]self,” as the Desiderata puts it. What I hadn’t yet suspected was that I myself would be both the greater and the lesser person, often on a dizzyingly rotating basis.
Until my grandmother invited me in to her knitting bag to poke around, the only credentials I had with yarn were an incident when I was four years old in which I cut a hairdresser’s entire basket of yarn and afghan-in-progress into pieces fit for attic insulation while my mother got a three-year-long haircut, the fluorescent bulbs flickered endlessly, and the waiting room TV droned. To be fair, my adventure with scissors into that glorious pile of color and texture was born of a keen interest and shining delight, and afforded me a great deal of joy. The hairdresser didn’t see it this way.
My first knitting project was a teddy-bear scarf. I was probably nine or ten, and I ran out of steam before the scarf was long enough to tie. It was two inches wide and eight inches long. My grandmother opened her knitting bag and asked if I’d like to look through all the buttons and choose one. Together we slowly made a pint-sized failure into a piece of bear couture using a filigreed button and some borrowed patience. For the rest of his days, that bear wore a narrow mauve scarf with a flash of antique silver at the throat.
My first cable project, in which the knitting gets fancy enough to require special hooked needles, twisting, counting, overlapping, and basically braiding textures while you also create the bulk of the garment, resulted in four inches of the bottom of a blue sweater, a pile of tangled yarn, and a broken bamboo needle. I’d chosen cotton yarn because it was pretty, unaware that cotton yarn has almost no give to it, and so I was basically knitting with concrete on a project that required a LOT of give and stretch to get those braids twining around each other. To make matters worse, my gauge (the tension and spacing between stitches natural to each individual) at the time was tight enough to… well, break bamboo.
“Caroline,” my friend Laura might have said, if I’d known her then, “your panic’s showing.” Gauge is something that you can’t fake. You can’t just say, “oh, I’ll knit looser” and move on, suddenly calmer. If your craft isn’t rhythmic and certain enough yet, you can’t trust the stitch, and so without even wanting to, you inadvertently tug each stitch tighter as you finish it, just to make sure nothing falls apart. And for a while, because nothing falls apart, you think you’re doing great. But tightness begets tightness, and soon your hands hurt and your stitches close down like collapsing tunnels through rock. Sure, nothing fell apart, but now the work has imploded and become a neutron star.
It took me probably 200,000 stitches (or a handful of bad sweaters) to start forgetting what I was doing. Now I’ve completed well over a million stitches, and my gauge is so loose my needles sometimes slide out the tunnel of stitches and faint to the floor, beguiled into a coma by my extraordinary suavity. Next time someone complains to you that they’re not getting any better at something, just shrug and say “it takes a million stitches, you know.” Then turn, duck, and run, and don’t expect them to invite you over again.
It seems unfair that the equivalent of a million stitches might really be what’s required to gain relative freedom within a craft, or skill, or art, or the pursuit of being a human. Like, by the time we start to figure stuff out, up-close selfies of our faces have begun to look like the floors of gravel quarries. This doesn’t work for me.
And, also, it does. Here’s why:
Row 1 of the sweater I’m currently knitting for my daughter, is a mixture of knits and purls (two versions of the same thing, but done from the front in one and from the back in the other). They come in a certain order, nothing fancy— you just have to count. That’s cake for my million-stitch hands, my million-stitch, boldly meditative brain. Row 2: same, but reversed. Same deal for rows 4, 5, and 8. Easy-peasy. I feel so expert during these rows that the fainting needle problem sometimes occurs, and I have to dial down the flow and turn up the attentiveness.
But rows 3 and 7 are cable rows. This is where the hooked needle comes out, where the resetting, layering, braiding, and adjusting happens; this is where the math moves as though on a slanted abacus, reorienting itself through the weaving process, which naturally has to shift locations throughout the pattern. I definitely can’t watch shows with subtitles during rows 3 and 7. Cable rows are for shows you can quote in your sleep.
I hold the hooked needle in my mouth, its metal a cold reminder against my teeth that if I drop a stitch or lose count, it’s going to be hours of hunting for the problem and trying to do barely comprehensible math… backwards. These are the rows where it’s most important to get it right, where your gauge gets yanked sideways and out of whack, where you open holes in your masterpiece and must trust that you will close them again, on the next row, in their new and sinuously twining positions.
I both dread and look forward to cable rows. As I turn the work and set my needle in to begin a cable row, I hear the scared and irritable whine of the mosquito of doubt, the long-ago shudder and clang of the failing Home Ec sewing machine. In cable rows, there is such enormous possibility for epic entanglement, for blisteringly frustrating mysteries when things go awry on a scale of single millimeters.
And yet, without cable rows, I’d sink into a bleary, luke-warm, rote-vegetable soup. (Yes I just did that). Without cable rows, the project would feel like a foregone conclusion, something accruing the grime of the past even before I can complete it. Without the cable rows, I’m just sort of mummifying myself in the dust of what I can already do pretty much perfectly.
I’ve begun to think of some days as cable days. They’re the tricky ones, where I stash tools in my teeth while I grapple the unsuitability of my present rhythm and skill to the present reality. There’s so much possibility for slippage, for ground lost, for confusion and struggle on these days. Often, in the midst of them, I hate them. Often, in the midst of them, I hate myself for having to work so hard to stay afloat. I reproach myself for not having it down already. I reproach myself for not having become an expert yet.
If I were, though, I’d be doomed to repeat rows 1 and 2 as long as I live. Few fates could splay as flat as one of perpetual expertise. My million-stitch hands would confidently, capably, take all beings into them and charm them into outright fainting. I’d be the Disney Prince of life, wooing all for no real reason except that I can, not having to work, skating along easily and across the surface of a predictable plot. Hopefully I’d have good hair, but that would be small solace in a life of incessant smoothness.
There is much beauty in regularity, confidence, skill, achievement, triumph, and well-executed pursuits. I value these and take joy in them. I find calm, meditation, pleasure, and pride in this realm. What I’m learning from a fisherman’s sweater is that during rows 3 and 7, as I cycle through the pattern, I shift from expert to relative beginner and back again, many times in each sitting. This, in itself, seems to me a work of art. Or hope. Or humanity. I gape at the gorgeousness of the transitions: confident to doubtful and back; relaxed to tense and back; rhythmic to jostling and back. In truth, I can think of very few pieces of luck greater than getting to be both an expert and a beginner on a quickly cycling basis— something about that makes for a seriously sweet groove.
When you wind your different selves together, your greater and lesser persons, your beginner and expert, you get not a single, even thread, but a cable. You get the thing that hugs itself and never resolves, just tumbles through its cycles. You get a twining rope. You know, the kind of thing you want to run your fingers over for the fun of it. The kind of thing one might need to save a drowning friend, or the self.
A cable runs from one place to another, connecting the two.
So enjoy extended metaphors. They leave all kinds of room to swim around inside of the images and be baptized by the wonder that emerges. Poetic truth is so much more compelling than the literal. Poetry keeps the conversation going. Literalism ends it.
Beautiful work and amazing perspective, both in writing and craft!