weaving

Read in LEAF-Writer

Madeleine Burnside

No mistake. Works at the loom a profusion of thoughts and angrily beats the red into place upon the grey. Makes no haste but in a sustained resentment forces them. Places the yarn. The warps are the parallel paths of her choices that bear her in a single direction, the teeth of the comb fit them, for a moment the colors appear superfluous to the continuing texture. She twists and resents what is seen as beauty arising.

At another moment sets the red in blocks in such a way that emotion is confused with attention to the work, the beating of the comb an essential part. She says of her children, sometimes I work at the loom, sometimes they understand. The difference between my life and theirs is that my disgust is not unraveled.

To the rhythm of the shuttle she breaks the symmetry of the pattern bysturning the fourth arrow inwards. In another year she tears her daughter and remakes the place differently so that scars cross. Her efforts are not to achieve but to continue. Rays of light from the window illuminate areas of the cloth, the sun marks her shines and creases her face. In the increasing brightness she becomes unable to discriminate between the fabric and the land.

She wishes to include her children, those changing qualities in her life, but as she withholds herself from her disappointments so she comes no nearer to her desires.

She sits on the floor and for a moment they feel she is accesible to them, her craft gamelike and simple, they warm to her, they speak.

At times weaving is not a pleasant task but a wasteland of drudgery, an end to which is not promised. She is aware at these times that cutting a rug from the loom does not relieve the ongoing pressure. She fasts. She does not sleep. The time opens and closes before her movements. She continues filled with a specific calm, spreading her hand on the surface of the loom as, beyond the window, the arms of trees are empty, precise, to catch on the curve of them lines of snow. She considers. It is in this spirit that she has named children, placing upon them yarn and dye in the hope that they will perform rites to announce all the phases of their passing.

And sitting inside the frame she will recast the work, another play of colors whose relations and individuals set in her mind the parting of the space. It is time to rewarp the loom; she has come very near to the end of the permitted period for she has played with the moment here as on other occasions she has forced the thread into place and had it shy away from her. She again pauses, lingers in the empty frame and smiles, having freed herself from the pulling of the hours she makes perfect indifferent gestures at the loom.

She perceives this stage as a part of a chain, the links placed in her life as an offering. She draws the edge in or, pulling the thread taut, settles herself within the rigid sides. She gathers her thoughts, they pass into the wool as, when it is spun, scenes from the landscape are twisted into it. She spaces the measures, this is one thread wrapped around the frame, rising and sinking always the same like herself and days.

The weavings are all of this thread that eases from her hand a troubled or a sweet excrescence into the world. This is her substance in which the moments are caught, their outline fingered and their matter consumed in such a way that they themselves become the fiber of the web.

I am a writer, not a weaver. The text is a metaphor for my craft. The descriptions of weaving are based on observations of Navajo women’s traditional skills in Ganado, Arizona, near Canyon de Chelly.