restingmotion

In which I have no idea what I am doing.

And that is perfectly okay.

 

I made no specific plans for 2023, no resolutions, only a vague idea along the lines of "nesting".  I didn't want to go anywhere do anything, just settle.  It seems that the time since I moved into this house, in late 2019 had been a time of turmoil.  There was Covid, a fall, struggles with atrial flutter that twice ended up sending me into heart failure, breast cancer, six surgical procedures, chemotherapy, and radiation.  I'm still here but the process itself has been life altering.

 

I'd moved into my new house, but I hadn't settled.  There has been a lot of fluffing, rearranging, working myself back into systems; there is still a lot I am really not keeping up with, although it is questionable whether I care enough to worry about any of that.  With all this puttering about, I have also come to a profound realization that there are a lot of aspects of who I was and what I chose to do which were no longer relative to who I am today and who I want to be.  Some of those realizations started off innocently enough, with baby steps, that led into sudden and unexpected metaphorical falls, or new realizations. 

 

As a result, what started out simply enough as a project involving a physical place called home, has ended up having profound repercussions on the spiritual place called self.  Doors have been opened.  Doors have been closed.  And I find myself in a new place that is simultaneously an old place, a place I have always been, although not always fully in touch with.

 

I am, oddly, content.  That word, oddly, is relevant here, because I have come to the realization that contentment is not truly familiar territory.  I have sought peace, sought contentment, or joy, or happiness, But somehow I always thought of it as something to achieve, somehow missing the point.  Contentment just is.  You cannot get there by trying.  But I was reared in a society and a world where planning and goals, and who one wants to be in life were paramount, and I have always been a planner, an organizer, an achiever, a doer of things.  I was brought up to believe that self alone was never enough.

 

Until, suddenly, it was.  I cracked a door, and something unexpected came flooding in.  I am content. I have no real plans.  I have no real expectations.  I don't know where I am going and I find that a perfectly satisfactory place to be.  

 

In fact it seems that all the times in my life when I had plans and expectations, goals, drives, schedules, all of these ideas of who I was, what I should do, who I should be were based on some idea outside myself that I had to live up to, that they were simultaneously a necessary adaptation to reality and a fools errand, a story I told myself in order to live, based on a version of artificial reality, perhaps.  There is the reality of the world.  Of culture, of society, of human community, which we create, and which is necessary for our very existence, and yet the very nature of the realities we create for ourselves is simultaneously arbitrary and completely necessary.  

 

I'm not saying I care not for the world.  I'm not saying anything really, except that I am here at a place in my life where I see that much of what I have pursued prior to this point does not have meaning to the person I am now, in this moment.  That does not mean my previous life, goals, experiences,  were a waste of time or meaningless, everything has led to where I find myself in this moment, on the threshold of something new, new to me.   I have no idea where I am going, or who I will be tomorrow, other than perhaps myself.  But I don't know who that self may be.  

 

Early in the year, I became fascinated with the Beowulf story.  I picked up the three or four different direct translations I have, and a couple of retellings of those interpretations, perhaps a story loosely based on the original but reshaped for the culture in which it was written.  My intent was to pursue this idea of the hero's journey and how this journey shaped an understanding of civilazation that still shapes us today.  And it does, still.  In beowulf we can see the roots of Christianity, of the Hebrew Bible which lies at the basis of three of the world's great religions, and whose beliefs and conflicts still shape the world today.

 

But I also saw something else.  Beowulf had to come home. The ultimate goal of the hero's journey is to take that journey back to where it started, to go home, and to learn how to live, not as the hero, but simply as himself as a human being.  Perhaps the goal of life is to go out on our grand journey, whatever that may be, and I believe all journeys and all goals are grand, but in the end we have to come back to ourselves, if we are lucky, to settle back into life, the life we were born to live, as our essential selves, to be who we are simply in the present, and that person is very close to the person we were born to be.  The ultimate goal then is a very small and personal life.  The hero's journey is the world.  The secret to eternal life exists in the tiny nugget of the soul, of being the self in the everyday passing of life.  

 

Oh, I gave up before I finished my studies.  I may have made all this up.  I don't know.  Perhaps I will get back to it.  Perhaps not.  I am at a stage in my life when fretting about the future seems meaningless.

 

What I do know, is that for all I have written and thought about expectation and control, and the letting go of same, the path from thinking to actually doing, or not doing as would be the case here, has proven to be fraught.  And now it is not. I suddenly find, that having softened my grip on my own expectations, many things that were holding to tightly have fallen away, and many new vistas have opened.  

 

All I know is that today matters.  And what I do today patterns, not for the world, but for my own soul, and in the end, that is all I can control.  I have no idea what my choices mean.  I'm not even sure that meaning, or intention, or plans are the things I should be pursuing.  I have no idea what next week brings.  I only know where I stand right now and that all I can do is what is important to me, right now, in this moment.  The future? Well I've never had any control over that no matter how much my human psyche is filled with plans.

 

It is time for another cup of coffee and to see what today brings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Knitted Tee

Autumn has arrived along with the requisite switching of the closets.  Generally this is a good thing as summer dressing is my least favorite and I I find joy in my reacquaintance with jeans, sweaters, boots, wool, and velvet.   I actually love this weather with mornings int he 40s and daytimes in the 60s or 70s.  But I don't mind looking forward to colder days with warm sweaters and toasty fires.

 

But what, you may ask,  about all those knitted tees I have made this past year?  Actually, they are perfect for the kind of weather we are having right now.  It is not yet woolly sweater season.  But the temperatures are perfect for layering and for thicker tees, which brings me 'round to yet another addition to my growing hand-knitted tee collection.

 

 

Presenting Arizona Sandstone.

 

This was a deep stash project.  The yarn, from a long since closed store called ArtFibers in SanFrancisco, was purchased before my grandson was born.  Named Fauvé, the yarn is a knitted tape, with alternating sections of beige cotton and a purple/lavender/bronze nylon blend.  The yarn is complicated enough that it seemed best suited to a simple tee, so to start I simply began playing with stitches.  Half-linen stitch is an old favorite for hand-dyed and novelty yarns, and I really liked the way the yarn knitted up in half-linen stitch, forming striations that reminded me of the patterns and colors of sandstone in the Arizona desert.

 

 

I didn't remember what my original plan was for the yarn  so once I got a gauge I liked, it was simple enough to make the calculations for a simple tee.  I wasn't initially sure if I would include sleeves, simply because I didn't know how much yarn I would need.  So I started with the idea of a sleeveless shell, and figured I would ad lib from there.

 

Well, I did have enough yarn, but I dilly-dallied a bit before actually starting on the sleeves.  I finished the body of the sweater on September 11th, but didn't pick up the yarn again to knit the sleeves until October 1.  The sleeves only took a day to knit, but did that mean that I was on a roll and finished the sweater forthwith? No, it did not.  

 

Cooler weather and the advent of autumnal colors started to seep into my head, eventually reminding me to get this project seamed and finished.   And now I have a new light-weight tee.  I think it will see a great deal of wear.

 

 

Technically the colors are a little on the warm side for me.  But they are also muted, and I can lean more toward muted warmth than I can toward clearer warm colors, so this tee actually works well with a great deal of my wardrobe.  

Meditation

I've been off-balance, wondering how to write about happy frivolous things in a world that feels far away from happy and frivolous.  Even as I write that I know it is not so simple and that frivolity must exist even in the face of despair, love in the face of grief and great pain.  That statement feels like nothing, a platitude, a feather in the wind. And yet that same dichotomy exists in my own life in the balancing of the despair, the pain and grief of the world, with the very present joys and consolations of the everyday interactions that fill my days.

 

Yet despite the peace of my own bubble, here it is laid out before me, a slap in the face, a reminder to my kinder nature that wishes to believe that we have evolved into a kinder species.  But no:  our brutal history, a history it seems we never quite escape, even sometimes within ourselves -- the urge to meet rage with rage, to fling more pain on top of our own, to cause hurt when we are hurting -- is ever present, and apparently still uncontrolled.  Of course much of the horror is driven by greed and lust for power, by those who would fuel division.  Pain and horror sells, grabs our attention, diverts us from the good. The people of the world do not deserve this.  

 

When I am distraught and distracted, I am drawn to music and to art.  Both remind me that life is a double-edged sword, that joy heals  pain. I despair for humanity, and yet I see awe in the face of a baby and smile, I watch the new buds of an azalea unfurl as the dry leaves of autumn swirl about them.  I know that I can offer arms of comfort but I do not always know how.  And yet, for all the power of our darker underbelly, we also have a gift for healing, for transcendence.  I cannot resolve the dichotomy of human existence, but sometimes I think that artists, and I include musicians in this, point me in the right direction.

 

At the end of September I attended a chamber concert by the Aubade Trio that was lovely indeed.  Yet there was one piece that stole my heart, still holds my heart, a piece by Ernest Bloch -- concertina for flute, viola and piano.  In those innocent days in late September the pieces felt joyous, prayerful, full of laughter.  Today it still feels joyous but my awareness has shifted slightly.   At the time that music danced in my head, and combined in my thoughts with an artist's exhibit I had seen the previous week, of waves and water, an immersive experience.  Those two sensory experiences still swirl in my heart, and although I don't see them differently per se, the way they resonate in my soul has shifted.  

 

I cannot exactly hear the music as it was played that evening.  There are recordings.  I've listened to two versions streamed on Amazon, and two on YouTube. Neither is quite the same, but that is the way of music, interpretation is always present, the conversational understanding between the artist performing the music and the artist who composed the framework.  But listening to variations reminds me of what I have heard.  Perhaps that is a curse, the specific nature of my memory.  No other performance is the same as the one by the Aubade trio.  It plagues me in concerts sometimes, to remember specific sequences of notes, of sounds, but it also rewards me with new insights.   Besides, even if the Aubade trio performed that work today, it is unlikely that it would be performed exactly as it was that night in late September, and I too am different today than I was two weeks ago. There are no absolutes.   

 

What I do know is that at the time of the concert, there were moments in the music when I was transported to moments at the Knoxville Museum of Art, where I was immersed in Jane Cassidy's piece You Never Forget The Swim.   The exhibit is visual, aural, experiential.  One sits in a dark room, sound from outside is muted but not absent. And one is immersed in an experience of water that is everything but the actual wetness.  Water in the abstract, the spiritual basis of water.   At different moments during that concert I would simultaneously be in that room, experiencing the joy of lightly rolling waves at the shore, remembering the way sometimes the light reflecting on water reminds me of the way light reflects on silk charmeuse, and through the sound of music.   The concluding movement reminded me of a carnival, but the good sides of a carnival, joy and sparkling lights, the bubbles in a glass of champagne, the frothy light bubbles that sometimes appear in waves, buoyant,  almost ephemeral.  

 

Although I cannot recreate the experience of the concert, I can return to the museum, to the experience.  And yet every time it is different, just as every time I am different.  Sometimes it is comforting, like a warm bath or a soft caress.  At other times the swirling seems out of control.  For the most part I find the experience calming, elemental even, much the same way I find music calming and elemental.  Both tie me to darker things.  The dark side is always present, but when faced with music, or art, I am not lost in that darkness but transformed.

 

After my first experience of You Never Forget the Swim, this is what I wrote in my journal  "caressing, stroking, smooth, comforting, enveloping, engulfing, drowning, strangling, suffocating, calming, eternal, love."   

 

Ernest Bloch and Jane Cassidy both might be horrified by my comparisons, or not, but this is how they have been captured in my experience in this particular space and time.  Each thing we create, each word we say even, these words included, once uttered, once created, flow out into the world creating new experiences beyond our control and our intent.  I hope my words overall are good, but I too am human and my feelings and run the gamut of human experience.

 

 

I wish I could share the experience of Jane Cassidy's work.  I highly recommend seeking her out.  I can, however, include a performance of the Bloch.  The first time I heard it I thought one thing.  The second another.  I might have found another version more prayerful, yet another more joyous.  It doesn't really matter.  When I listen again this morning, just before posting this, I am compelled to tears during the slow movement, and then slowly, as if the music is tickling my toes, slowly first, but just enough.  And despite the tears, a smile rises and I know there is hope.  There is always hope.

 

 

The Fall Garden

Oh the joys of autumn flowers and the fading of the garden.  A post of photos more than words

The nights are cooling and even though the garden has a distinct autumnal tone,  the summer garden has not completely died back, and fall blossoms shine.   Coreopsis Summer Sunshine has begun to bloom, showing up  consistently in late September and typically continuing well into November. 

Also, new to me, pineapple sage looks beautiful next to the garage. Not hardy here, unless we have an unusually mild winter, but I will put in more next year. It is doing much better in this spot than the rosemary that lived her previously.

The second bloom of the sedum.  The first was in July.

The roses are happy with the warm, dry days.

And the fall blooming azaleas.  I had spring azalea blossoms, but it was not the best year.

Lastly, I am letting the oregano go to seed and am thoroughly enjoying the blossoms on both the oregano beds and the Thai basil (no photograph).

 

I've done both less than I hoped, and more than in the past, so a good year.  I am filled with encouragement and hopes.  I suppose one could ask for nothing more.

A New Tee and a Wardrobe Surprise

Somewhere along the line I apparently decided that I needed some simple tees, warmer weather tees perhaps, although these are mostly transitional weather projects, not suitable for the heat of full summer, at least not in Tennessee, not for me, although I can admit that after living here for over 10 years now, I am getting a little more cold-natured than I was.  Not sure that this transition has anything to do with Tennessee, but is probably more the affect of age and the aftermath of cancer/heart issues.  

 

All this to say that the purple/yellow tee I showed you two posts back has been finished.

This all came about rather serendipitously.  While I was knitting the lilac Noro tee (two posts back), I was volunteering at the welcome desk at my church, and knitting, when I had a conversation with another knitter.  We talked about our love of Noro yarns and she told me about a simple tee pattern she had recently discovered and really loved.  The pattern was Olori Sweater Tee by Lanre Ojikutu, which I immediately looked up on Ravelry, purchased and dowloaded even though at that point I had no immediate plans to knit it.   After I finished that tee, I had a little over half a skein, or 316 yards, of the light purple Noro yarn left over. I had been eyeing a skein of the same yarn in an acid yellow/green and it occurred to me that the two yarns would work well together.  However it took me a couple of weeks to make up my mind and actually buy the second (yellow) skein.  But eventually I did, and this sweater was born.

 

I hadn't knit a top down raglan sweater in quite some years, and I had never knit one that was intended to be even slightly fitted.  The pattern is meant to have 1" to 2" of positive ease.  Mine is closer to 0 to 1", at the bust, a little looser elsewhere.  I didn't make a gauge swatch because I had just knit a stockinette sweater using the same yarn, but I should have.  Not surprisingly, my gauge when knitting in the round is slightly tighter than when knitting flat, although the difference is not large.  Since I was trying this on as I went, it was not an issue.  Actually all that trying on was in order to finagle the raglan shaping just a bit to accommodate my uneven shoulders.  I am happy with the result, it is acceptable, but I do think I could have adjusted the stitch counts slightly and have made a note of this for the future. I am not sure these notes translate directly to the next project due to differences in gauge, weight, spin and fiber content and they way all affect the actual knitted fabric, but the process was a useful learning project.

 

Best of all I am very happy with the result.  The only real change I made to the pattern was to add a little extra room at the hips, where I needed it.

I used up the remainder of the purple yarn (316 yards) and 7/10ths of the skein of yellow yarn (370 yards) for a total of 686 yards.  My sweater is longer than the original as I am tall, but that is a minor adjustment.

 

The big surprise was how well this sweater goes with a pair of yellow chinos.  This was not planned.  I am a firm believer in serendipity, and the idea that what one loves tends to be harmonious.    Anyway, I've worn the yellow chinos for years with white, or black, sometimes with soft pinks and greens, but I've never had anything that actually "went" with it.  And frankly I didn't think I had anything in my closet that would match this sweater.  I just thought the colors were pretty and I could always wear it with jeans, or especially with white jeans or cords, both of which I do own.

 

Happy serendipity.

 

 

 

Speeding up and slowing down, Autumn arrives.

Sunday evening was our neighborhood picnic.  The air felt distinctly autumnal on this early fall evening, the prelude to Yom Kippur, not that the two events were at all related, or that our feasting on shared dishes bore any relation to the impending fast, if indeed knowledge of that fast even registered.  Yet I couldn't help but be reflective, as I flitted in and out of the crowd, occasionally intentionally on the sidelines, watching neighbors group and regroup, thinking about community and coming together -- little bubbles of contact in a world that is both overcrowded with both people and things to do, and yet at the same time strangely solitary and isolating.

 

This year in particular the contrast between the physical season and the cultural season occupies my mind, the almost yin and yang of it, the way that we humans grow busy, filling our evenings particularly, with cultural events, as the earth itself is winding down into a time of rest.  When the earth is full verdancy we are off celebrating our individual pursuits; as the light grows dim we band together, partly for comfort, but also I wonder, if partly to distract ourselves from the reminder of the inevitability of the impending darkness.  We seem to forget that rest, even death, is part of the necessary cycle of life, as if, by keeping ourselves busy we can forestall its arrival.  

 

If we keep running from event to event, from achievement to achievement, from high to high, can we outrun death?  What about the necessity of repose.  Nature must rest.  The earth must rest.  Our bodies must rest.  But I am an introspective soul living in a world where external distractions are the dominant mode.

 

Autumn is my favorite season.  But it is also the season in which I feel pulled in many directions.  The arts and music scenes have geared up again, and I am happy to reconnect with friends.  I could allow myself to become frenetically busy, even as my soul is yearning for and remembering rest and renewal.

 

Within the social whirl, I seek islands of repose.  Yesterday was one such day, a day where I could spend time in the garden, hands in the earth, putting some areas to bed for the coming winter, seeding garden beds with cover crops, or perhaps with luck, a small winter garden of frost-tolerant plants.  As I putter, my mind wanders and I reflect on the activities of the past week.

 

Although my weekend ended with the fall picnic, it began with the opening concert of the symphony season -- Pictures at an Exhibition.  Mussorgsky's work, as orchestrated by Maurice Ravel was the titular attraction, and the closing piece: well-performed, familiar, exciting, rousing the audience into a sense of communal high spirits.  It was a good concert, well planned and well played, from the opening trumpets on the balcony as concert-goers entered the theater, a festive glass of champagne in hand.  The concert opened with Adam Schoenberg's Picture Studies, based on the same structural scaffolding as Mussorgsky's work.  This modern work, inspired by works in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City was a good opening choice, both thematically, but also temperamentally with its very American sense of movement and lyricism.  I find Schoenberg's works to be accessible and likable, easy on ears and sentiments. This piece was no exception. and the performance was engaging and quite satisfying.  A projection screen was mounted behind the orchestra, and the referenced works were featured for nine of the ten sections of the piece.  I personally find that my eyes are drawn to the screen, which distracts my mind from fully attending to the music, but I suspect I am in the minority on this, and eyes can be closed, allowing the music itself full expression.  Picture Studies is also a feast for the percussion section, which sustained the excited air of enthusiasm that had begun with the trumpet fanfare, would continue through the second piece, Alexander Arutiunian's Trumpet Concerto, performed by brilliant young trumpeter William Leathers, and,  of course, ending with the triumphant ending of the Mussorgsky.  All in all it was a rich, brightly enlivening celebration of the arts, of music, of lighting up the impending darkness, of the power of music and the gathering of community.

 

But that was only the denouement to my week.  A couple of other events preceded the concert, of which I will only focus on one now.

 

On Wednesday evening I attended a performance of Cato, Joseph Addison's play, first performed in 1713, about the last days of Cato the younger.  This performance was staged through a historical lens, based on a performance for George Washington's troops in 1778,  a joint endeavor through several departments and UT, intended, at least in part, to further discussion on the ideas of liberty and responsibilities to community.  

 

Admittedly I attended as much for the drama itself, for the language and ideas as much as for the idea behind the performance, the continuing discussion of the meaning of liberty.  I am a bit of a restoration literature fan, and I reveled in the wonderful eighteenth century dialogue.  I sometimes miss this use of language, here so artfully rendered by the actors; a play that eloquently explores ideas and responsibilities in a way that is both thought-provoking and entertaining.  The play is a tragedy, and yet oftentimes comic, as are all human endeavors.  I had read the play but never seen it performed, and of course we all know lines from the play, lines that have become part of our American History -- "Give me liberty, or give me death" among them.   I loved the expository passages, the explorations of individual liberty versus governmental tyranny, but also the explorations of the dangers of individual liberty, both covered in an abstract sense in the debates between the characters, but also quite realistically in the action of the drama itself.  Logic versus emotion; republicanism vs monarchism; we still debate these same ideas today, they show up in our debates, our marches, our literature our movies.... What are our rights? And our responsibilities? And with rights do not also come responsibilities?  Joseph Addison obviously thought so, as did the founding fathers of this country.  And even as their understandings of liberty and even the "rights of all men" may feel narrow minded compared to our views today, they still have much to teach us.  The forest remains.  

 

And so my thoughts continue to swirl.  Autumn is here.  Darkness is inescapable.  But the darkness itself, and our own struggle with life, the meaning of existence, the very things that make us human, is it not this very thing that drives us to make art?  Is art the embodiment of this very battle with darkness, with rest, and death?  Would there be art if we never knew repose?  If we never fought for meaning? If we never sought the light?

 

 

  

 

 

Neither Lost nor Forgotten

I finished knitting a sweater in early August and I forgot to share it with you.  I didn't forget the sweater itself, a tee, and have been wearing it frequently since the weather started to cool.  In fact, I think it will see a lot of wear.

 

This sweater came about on a bit of a whim.  I had been admiring the pretty purple yarn in my lys, when I also saw the Noro spring summer knitting book that includes this pattern.  This is the same book that had the pattern for the green cardigan I posted two weeks ago, although I knit this sweater first.   The yarn is called  Akari Solo,and it is a silk/cotton/rayon/mohair/wool and nylon blend from Noro yarns.  I knitted the tee on a size 6 needle, which gave me a post-blocking gauge of 16 stitches and 24 rows to 4 inches.  This is slightly looser than the recommended gauge of 18/26, but this yarn at this gauge felt stiff and tight to me on the needles even though the final fabric is soft with a gentle drape.  I do not think I could happily knit it any tighter, and I think a more open fabric is often preferable in a summer knit.  Anyway, it was easy enough to do the math required to adjust the pattern to my gauge.

 

Even so, I did mess up a bit although not with the maths. I modified the pattern slightly to adapt the fit to my own shoulders, and I intentionally knit it is a more closely fitting sweater than the designer had envisioned. However I also ended up modifying the pattern placement inadvertently.  There are supposed to be three motifs across the bottom of the tee, and then two only following the first full repeat.  I did not notice that in the photo, and, as I read the pattern quickly, with an idea already in my head, I misconstrued part of the instructions.  That was completely my fault, although I am somewhat dyslexic (despite my heavy reading) and I do sometimes get instructions scrambled.  At any rate, by the time I discovered the mistake, I decided I actually like my slightly eccentric placement, and forged ahead without ripping.  I've always preferred that were a little off-kilter, or slightly off-proportion anyway, so this suits me perhaps even better than the original.

 

The resulting sweater is soft and comfortable.  Perhaps not suitable for the hottest and most humid days of August,  but perfectly fine when the humidity is lower or the temperatures in the 70s to even low 80s or below.  It is also a good weight for layering with jackets and cardigans throughout the Autumn and Spring months, so I do believe this will see a lot of wear.

 

I used slightly less than 1 1/2 skeins, of 749 yards to knit this sweater.  Inspired by my joy in this top perhaps, and spying the same yarn in a pretty yellow, I decided that I could combine it with the purple to knit another tee, in progress now, and shown below.

It ends up that I no longer object to simple stockinette knitting, and I like having a relatively mindless project on the needles for those days when I either am distracted or just tired (quite suitable after a tough day in the garden for example).  I apparently also like knitting simple tees that I will wear, although I haven't yet moved onto simple stockinette on small needles.

 

Thoughts on Late Summer Reading.

Books, books, books.  I am surrounded by books.  Unfortunately, I have recently read very few of them, two in July, four in August.  My desk is littered with volumes I have picked up and started only to cast them aside.  This was not because the books themselves were unappealing or not worth reading, but because my mind was trapped elsewhere, lost in some liminal space.

 

In fact liminality seems to have been the theme for this year.  I started the year with the idea of nesting flitting about my brain, but as the year has progressed it seems that the building of this nest consists of a series of forays through the mists of uncertainty.   As soon as I find some grounding I open another door, step through, and find I am not wherever I thought I was headed.

 

This is not a bad thing in and of itself, just as not reading, at least for a short time, is not a bad thing, although, being a reader, I tend to be somewhat suspicious of people who never read. But I have distracted myself from writing about reading, reading during a time when I was a distracted reader.  There was no particular direction to what I did read so I might as well plunge in.

 

I did read two long fantasy novels, although not contiguously.  Those were The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson and A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin.  The Sanderson came first, and I picked up the Martin specifically because I had read the Sanderson.  I needed a balance, and I have been intermittently working my way through the Game of Thrones series when the mood strikes.    Admittedly I struggled with Sanderson, not because it was difficult or boring but perhaps because the writing was almost too simple and the novel seemed two-dimensional at best.  Oh, Sanderson carries the action well, and parts of the novel were compelling.  He is obviously imaginative, and his world-building is consistent, well-thought, and even detailed.  But I still found it lacking, two-dimensional even, as if reading a novel was more like reading a comic book, or looking at the set for a movie.  Sanderson does not claim to be a "writer".  His sentences are short and the writing is functional, technically probably only on a 3rd or maybe 4th grade level.  Some of the ideas are more advanced than that of course, and there is more to reading than the actual technical portion; the ideas here are not teh ideas of childhood. But I felt the ideas were only explored and revealed on a fairly shallow level, with a lot of repetition of simple themes. 

 

Martin, on the other hand is more complex.  The use of language is still quite accessible, probably 4th grade level, maybe 5th.  But most popular novels are in fact written at 7th grade level or below, and don't get me started on that subject for I crawl into a tunnel so deep I may not emerge.  Martin's world-building is much more complexly layered than Sanderson's. The psychology of his characters much more deeply explored, in all their all-too human jumble of good and evil intentions, longings, fears, insights, and blind-spots.  No one in Martin's novels is purely good or purely evil, although some lean further one way or another, just as humanity itself is unendingly complex. Martin manages to engage the reader not only in the action of the story, but in the minds of its participants.  In fact, I much prefer Game of Thrones the novels to the televised version simply because of its deeply detailed psychology.  Sanderson could just as well be a movie or a computer game, at least as far as my interests are concerned:  entertaining, compelling to a point perhaps, but ultimately not satisfying.  But perhaps I am missing the point of what appeals to Sanderson's many fans.  Already I tend to reckon myself a dinosaur.

 

A few light novels were mingled in with these two tomes.

 

A Dress of Violet Taffeta by Tessa Arlen is a fictionalized biography of Lucy Duff Gordon, a a leading British fashion designer in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.  She was the first British fashion designer to achieve international acclaim, and her story is therefore worth telling, and interesting to me.  When I picked up this book, I didn't necessarily know who it was about, just that my mom enjoyed it and enjoyed reading about the dresses.  Well, I always enjoy reading about fashion and color and fabric and I was hooked.  I think the book is strongest in the first half.  Young, divorced, with a child to support, Lucy Wallace has always enjoyed making clothes for her dolls, so she takes this interest to the next step and opens a dressmaking shop, Maison Lucille, where she is quite successful.  The early portions of the novel are filled with descriptions of the qualities of silks, of colors, and of dress designs, and it is a feast of artistic and dressmaking sensibilities, co-mingled with Lucy's own personal struggles in a society that does not encourage women to be entrepreneurs.   I felt the novel began to flounder after Lucy marries Cosmo Duff Gordon and the story becomes more about society, Lucy's elite clientele, and her expanding empire.  I was more interested in Lucy the artist than I was in Lucy the society figure. The Duff Gordons were on the Titanic, and this episode, and the devastation it caused to their lives is included in the novel, although I felt the novel was not as rich with insight here as in the earlier chapters.   The novel concludes with hints of struggles in her marriage, but Lucy in charge of a still-expanding empire.  In actuality Lucille limited collapsed shortly afterward:  Lucy Duff Gordon was bankrupted and lost her business once it was revealed she no longer designed the clothes sold under her name.  Still the novel was light and enjoyable and has sparked an interest in learning more about the actual dresses.

 

Lucy's exploration of color and the qualities of silk was followed by another installation in Daniel Silva's series of novels about Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon.  The Defector may not be my favorite of these books, but it was still intricately detailed and well-plotted.  The story line is formulaic and I noticed a fair amount of repetition, but this could be that I am just deeply into this series by now.  The characters are complex, intelligent, and flawed but thoroughly human.  Assassins are what we generally categorize as "bad guys" but Allon is complex and often even likable.  I like the way Silva takes recent political events (at the time the novels were written) and uses them as a jumping off place to explore both politics and human relations with a deft mix of actual news with fictional supposition that makes this reader think.

 

Finally, as August came to a close, I found myself reaching for more something more literary.  The Booker Prize longest had been announced but I found myself strangely ambivalent, for the first time in many years.  Still, I happened upon a copy of one of the novels, Western Lane,  by Chetna Maroo, and picked it up.  This is a debut novel told in the retrospective voice of an adult looking back at a critical time in her youth.  It is a novel of grief, of coming of age, and of the complicated expectations and negotiations involved as children grow into adulthood navigating complex cultural expectations. Here, the Gujarati culture of the parents generation, with the competing worldly reality experienced by second-generation immigrants in Luton and Edinburgh, neither purely English nor Indian in their perceptions.   I thought the book was charming and touching, which sounds strange for a book about grief.  But most of the depth here, the connection between the characters, occurs in the background, behind the words, in hinted-at gestures and glances.  The title of the book, and much of the action revolves around the game of squash, and the opening passages of the book, where the narrator, Gopi, explores the sound of a ball on the squash court as a metaphor, is quite well done.   It is not a book that strives to resolve anything; it is a snapshot of a time, of a state on the cusp between childhood and adulthood.  Despite profound moments, the prose is more serviceable than beautiful and the characters remain somewhat shadowy.  Yet I do feel the author's way of using squash to further the story, of dealing with rather profound and intense emotions in a rather veiled way works in a way I found moving.  I'm not sure this novel is what I would have called "Booker level" but the author shows great talent and promise and I would love to read more of her work.

 

Lastly, I read (reread actually, although at first I didn't recall that) Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.  I didn't give it the attention it deserves, what with my general ennui concerning all things reading.   I find Fanny fascinating, although I do understand how she is the least accessible of Austen's heroine's to modern sensibilities.  And I was equally fascinated by the scenes revolving around the play and its immorality, which seem inconceivable to modern sensibilities, but which play out in rather shocking detail later in the novel.  In the end I only decided to put the book back on my reading list, perhaps following Pride and Prejudice.  The idea has lodged itself in my brain that perhaps Mansfield Park was written as the antithesis to Pride and Prejudice, as a very polemical attempt to explore these very same moral issues that are portrayed in both novels in very different ways.  I now think the latter may be the most abstract of Austen's novels, and perhaps the most overtly ironic and political.  Or I may be imagining this.  I will have to read both novels.

 

More reading ahead it appears.  I've always known this to be true.  But when I continue reading, will I look back on what I've written here and wonder about my own understandings?  Be embarrassed even at what I missed or did not see?  Perhaps so, perhaps that is best, or perhaps not.  I am a fan of rereading; anything worthwhile reveals new depths, just as any journey through life doesn't so much take us to new places, as it leads us to see familiar things in new ways.

 

 

 

 

Linen Layers

I surprise myself sometimes, often-times really, but that is neither here nor there.

When I was knitting the Elisabetta Shawl earlier in the summer, I noticed that it coordinated perfectly with a favorite summer linen dress.  The shawl works well with quite a few things in my wardrobe actually, but it does in fact coordinate perfectly with that dress.  And that coincidence, as neither the yarn nor the dress were procured with thought of the other in mind, prompted some mental plotting.

As I was finishing up Elisabetta, I was looking at the new Noro Knitting Magazine, #22, Spring/Summer 2023.  There were several projects I could see myself knitting and wearing, including the cardigan shown above, "Nantucket" by Deborah Newton which is knit in Noro's Asaginu, a fine linen/paper yarn.  

Much as I am intrigued by Asaginu, and I did buy some for another project, I decided that I wanted to knit this cardigan to wear as a topper over a particular green linen dress.   

Asaginu comes in many beautiful colors, but none of them worked with the dress I had in mind.  Instead I chose this fingering-weight linen from Quince & Co. called Sparrow.  The color is #215 Banyon.  Asaginu is classified as a DK weight yarn whereas Sparrow is fingering, although Asaginu is slightly lighter in weight due to its construction and materials.   I knew my sweater would be different, airier perhaps, perhaps heavier, but I thought I would like it nonetheless.

The knitting is fairly straightforward with a simple 4-row lace pattern and stockinette, although I admit that it took me most of the sweater to keep the alternating rows of the lace pattern straight.  I blame this on dyslexia and a lifetimes struggle with right and left.  I had to concentrate to remember if I was on the  K2tog, yo, K2tog, yo, K1, SSK row or the yo, SSK, yo, SSK, K2tog, yo, K1 row.  For some reason the SSK-dominant rows were easier for my mind to grasp than was the alternative.  Anyway I eventually got it.  I did have to knit the left front twice as I inadvertently knit two right fronts.  That too is a mental thing.  I can intellectually comprehend the idea of knitting the left like the front, reversing the shaping, but in order to actually do it, I have to specifically write the instructions out before progressing.  

Even as I knit the left front twice, I still made a mistake on that second knitting, one I did not pick up until I wore the sweater, even though it was right in front of my eyes the entire time.  I have no problem with deconstructing, ripping and reknitting projects, and have done it many times, but not this time.  It has been an emotional year, an even more emotional summer in some ways, as I transition from being a person who struggled with life-changing health issues, to being a self that is on a slightly different path than the one I was on before.  I left that little bump of mis-knitting as a reminder that life is never perfect, that there are always bumps along the way, and that perfection is itself an illusion an illusion that often holds us back.

I got the exact dimensions of the small/medium, which was my intention, although my gauge was slightly different.  Although I am not small, the smaller sized was plenty oversized for me.  The shapes are simple:  basic rectangles with a little bit of neck shaping,  The pattern does call for back neck shaping, which I like as it makes the cardigan lay more nicely, but I did alter the neck and shoulder shaping ever so slightly to accommodate my particular shape.  And yes, the fronts are exactly the same size, only the shoulder shaping differs, and that only slightly.

The sweater is wider than it is long, (27 x 22)and I think it looks somehow more appealing on the blocking board than it does assembled and flat.  This is not a garment I would necessarily find appealing sitting on a shelf in a store although I do think it is very flattering on the body.  Although the impetus for knitting this cardigan was narrowly focused, it will, in fact,  work with many things in my wardrobe. 

The finished cardigan is the perfect little summer topper.  Linen works for Tennessee humidity.  It is loose, light and airy, almost weightless even.  I used slightly less than 4 50-gram skeins of linen, or 194 grams to be exact.  I even found the perfect buttons in my stash.  

Summer is almost over, but warm weather should hang around for a while.  I can see myself wearing this with not only white but many neutral colors, and the sheerness will play nicely with contrast.    A happy knit.

Hello September: Random Musings

PreDawn:

 

I can't say that my extended period of resettling myself has provided any great answers in terms of the meaning life or even my role in life.  I can say that although I find myself exactly where I was, my perceptions have altered slightly.  This may be the most we can hope for, the most that is desired from life.  The journey is the same.  The trajectory may vary.

 

I've been happily puttering here and there, engaged in this process of resettlement.  I have a pile of family photos piled up on the  laundry island, where I play around with arrangements, a part of the process of moving those photos out of the box they have been stored in for the last four years and getting them on the walls, perhaps an essential step to actually claiming this space.  A mental mark of acceptance.  If the photos are up, I am here.

I've also been organizing the basement storage area, an ongoing project that is not yet finished but which has a profound impact on my sense of well-being.  A part of that process has also been organizing the downstairs pantry:

 

Which includes some summer canning.  It has not been. good year for tomatoes, and I frankly have not grown or found tomatoes that are worth the effort of preserving, so it will be a year of store-bought.  I am fortunate to be able to do that, this is one of the luxuries of our modern life, that we can find almost anything we need easily, and do not have to put in the work of growing and saving our food. But I wonder sometimes what this has done to our souls. 

 

I have put some things up this year:  zucchini relish, pickled fairy-tale eggplant, various soups and other vegetables.  There are many things in the freezer as well, pesto, sorrel puree, herb purées.  I was thinking about this process just this weekend as I brought in armfuls of Thai basil to be washed, the leaves inspected and plucked from long stems, all to be processed with oil for use in soups and dishes throughout the coming year.  It is a very meditative process, and for me a meaningful one.  It strikes me sometimes that the modern way is to seek out entertainment to find ways to distract ourselves from monotony and to find meaning, when perhaps in our ease we have actually lost something far more profound.  Perhaps part of the meaning in life comes from these activities of caring for ourselves and for others, perhaps even from discomfort, from the necessity of discomfort.

 

Perhaps I think too much.  Well, I have long known this to be true.

 

Aside from cooking and organizing the basement, I am still cataloging knitting patterns.  I have a stash that is too large.  I freely admit it.  I forgive myself for accumulating it at a time when perhaps buying yarn and fabric and patterns was a way of holding onto dreams during a time of trial and stress.  At the same time, perhaps my accumulation of yarn and my tendency to keep a pantry are related urges.  

This particular blog post quite possibly makes no sense.  There is no specific theme here.  There is much to be done and nothing will ever be finished.  There are more weeds than I can pick.  But sometimes those weeds are beautiful as well and I am inclined to let them be, for a moment at least.

 

 

When it all gets to be too much, I will sit in a cozy corner of the deck and watch the birds frolic in my garden.  I don't have bird feeders, but the cardinals and robins and doves, a family of quail even among the more anonymous birds, a tufted titmouse hopping on the rail near me as I type these words.  We have gotten friendly the birds and I, I sit and weed, or let my mind wander, the birds chirp and hop around me.  Sometimes I get too close.  This experience, of being in the garden together is worth all the unruliness.  

 

It is the quiet moments, the dove hiding behind the planter, a sudden weedy flower, the unexpected, that are worth more than any goal, any intentional destination.