We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.

I do not tend to put the things I have knitted on this blog. That is because to do so requires a big photographic expedition, followed by a description of what I have made, and the descriptions never do encompass the things, because the things are not really about the things in their thingness, but about the memory of their making, somehow wrapped into all the stitches.


I can look at this scarf and say, I remember what people were talking about while I knitted this gray section, and that it started raining outside during that purple, and before I knew it, as the daylight was fading into the evening time, there was pink. When I added the second ball of yarn, I could almost not contain myself from keeping knitting, and all around me were people who were expecting to eat dinner sometime, and, it turns out, I was supposed to make that dinner. I was thinking about Jasper Johns when I looked at those little flecks of contrasting green, and watching my cat want to devour the thing back at that point where blue turned back into rose.

And how can a picture, or a picture and details about needle size and pattern, contain that?



I have decided to call it the Heraclitus scarf, because the unbearable, unavoidable pleasure of making it is the intensity of the colors and their changes. Just when you think you could never leave the multi-flaked world of that green, you are thrust into a teal blue, with the knowledge that it is about to change into a rich blue like saturated skies, and then, before you know it, pale raspberry pink. How does a person handle that much flux? Does the pleasure of this yarn come from how many things it lets you see all at the same time, or from the knowledge that if you do not surrender yourself to it every single moment that you are knitting, you will miss something gorgeous? And how is it exactly that fibers find a way to contain that richness of color that I thought was reserved for mosaic tiles and the way they combine to make an overwhelming space of light and color?


[for the curious: made with Noro Iro yarn, 2 balls, on US size 11 needles]