Tuesday, June 26, 2007

I is an Order-Word

She began to see her self as only a collection of threads. They spilled out from her body, flowed out and down to end up as a tangled mess on the floor. She sat down, and began the tedious process of carefully seperating the threads, one by one. They were overlapped often forming impossible knots. Deep down she knew she should give up. She should just leave the threads on the floor messed up and untidy. But they would trail behind as she walked, and, worst, people would step on them. So she persisted in attempting to create order.


Sometime, around midnight, she got out the scissors. The impossible knots she cut away. The threads were shorter but less complicated. She gathered the rest of the threads and wove them into a picture. It was a basic picture as she was inadept at weaving. But it was finally a picture of herself. She carefully tucked the tapestry into her body.


On the days when she could see fuzzy edges around her mirror image, she drew out the taspestry. There were always new pieces of thread hanging from the bottom, the top, the sides. Sometimes the older threads unraveled. She would once again sit on the floor, and began to weave. The urge to use the scissors increased with each reweaving. She hated to admit it but she often cut even when there was no knots.

3 comments:

John B-R said...

Do you know the work Mona Hatoum did with her hair? Do you know the work of Cecilia Vicuna? Just to mention two other women for whom threads and tangles signify ...

Unknown said...

I haven't heard of them but it sounds very intersting...I'll have to do some research.

Horacio said...

A beautiful post: what threads do we keep, which ones do we cut?
the creation of the self as a beautiful art form.