Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Making the material, the fabric.

Making the thread, the yarn, and moving the thread, the yarn around itself so that it becomes the material, the fabric, the basis for many events and warmths.

Spinster, as a word, has been pretty much shrunk down to denoting a lack--no husband, a woman who does not now have and never has had a husband. For a long time, that was a legal category, the legal term for someone like that was spinster.

Originally, it meant a job mostly done by women, including women with husbands. The job of taking a big wad of natural fiber, wool or cotton, say, and spinning it insto a thread, a skinniness, that can then be woven into a wide, thin holding togetherness.

I want women to do this now in different ways. Looking at the wads of what we've got and feeling how to make it thin, then broad and newly useful.

To have a dream while waking up and know that that's what it's about--spinstering, spinning into a different way of being, held by different kinds of fabrics.

The mostly guy-led way of studying material all the way down is now seeming a bit dead-end-ish to some. During a lot of the sequence of figuring out matter in the Western physics way, women weren't allowed in that playground.

So now some of us have more time and somehow we could let a new question find us.

Mater, mother, matter. What is everything made of basically, really? The style of asking the question may matter? Analytically, yes, we've been doing that, and expensively. What you are made of and what rocks are made of--how is another way to know more about that?

Be spun by the very nature of matter and spin into another way of knowing about it. Yes, no, maybe. I mean, massive being sneered at is built into the job, to the extent that anyone of current importance notices that it's happening. That is not a variable. There will be sneering.

But fun in trying, and healing in partially succeeding. Maybe healing in ways and at scales quite against current rules.

Women's traditional fabric work--spinning, weaving, knitting, crocheting, quilting, much more--can be experienced by the doer as soothing and trancemaking, in a good way. Doing it with a group you like to be with and talk with helps.

When all women had to do that kind of work, some of them experienced it as really boring, part of the system of being ground down to brainlessness.
So now, in some places, some women could do that work and got back and forth more--spinning, thinking, dreaming, and find and by found by we don't know what yet. Spinster turns out another way to make the little bigger and more useful. Spinster maybe you. We need to demand the impossible of each other in detailed ways.