Knitting+Fairies

With two sticks and some serious patience, I can make a piece of string behave like a piece of fabric. But it's really just a piece of string. Illusion incarnate. Grab an end and give it a pull, and the whole thing unravels. Never existed. I am thinking of this in response to the reflections on a Moebius strip. The first time I encountered a Moebius strip, I sat and played with it for an hour. More blind blowing than, er, "artificial, exterior contaminants". My hands were telling me a truth that my brain declared impossible, while my eyes were trying their best to devise a compromise. Knitted fabric short-circuits my brain in similar ways if I contemplate it long enough. One piece of string, looped in and out and around itself like some kind of snaked-out celtic knot. Hundreds of stitches; one string. You knit in horizontal rows, like typing on a typewriter, straight lines, completely linear, and what comes out is curved and angled, textured and gapped. One string. Who figured out that two sticks could convince a piece of string that it had so much potential? Geometric self-reflection, refraction, diffraction.

My personal cognitive philosophy is based on what I call "simultaneous multiples," which has a satisfactorily theoretical ring to it, but all it means is that in every moment of encountering the world, we are confronted by thousands of pieces of information, thousands of meanings. If we were to actually try to process all that at once, our heads would pop. Language gives us a way of reducing all that meaning to something manageable. It's a giant filter on the world. Double-entendres, meditation let us process several meanings simultaneously, but it's still limited. Language gives us a way of connecting things, but in the process of making those connections, it makes a picture, a fabric, and what later doesn't fit, gets cut out. That's why kids are so much more likely to accept possibilities. They haven't finished describing their picture, their world-view. There's still room for definition. The rest of us, we're defined. We might edit a bit here and there, maybe add a new splash of color in a corner, but by and large, our world-view is framed. Gnomes don't fit. You will never see a fairy. There will always be war.