the right shed at the right time (in weaving as in life)
skin-contact textiles
“The object world bowed and slept and grew enormous as something completely without space, as a container without volume, lightless, soundless, and did this inside a world even larger and more obscure than itself, a world we were walking through, which no one knew what to call (other than ‘old’) and no one understood the dimensions of but what was ours, this grid that had been touched by a circle, these noisy, impenetrable doors.” Renee Gladman, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, 2013
“since they build their own externalised memory traces, these built ‘environmental’ cues are extremely reliable, allowing the cognitive system to evolve in the direction of extending itself to encompass the previously external, niche-constructed environment (the web itself).” Hilton F. Japyassú and Kevin N. Laland, “Extended Spider Cognition,” 2017
a loom is a spaceship. a loom is a cyborg mech. a loom is virtual reality.
“Even if a woman sits at a loom, it does not mean she must weave a cosmogony or clothes to cover the emptiness underneath. It might just be a piece of cloth which, like any center of attention, absorbs the available light the way a waterfall can form a curtain of solid noise through which only time can pass. She has been taught to imagine other things, but does not explain, disdaining defense while her consciousness streams down the rapids. The light converges on what might be the hollow of desire or the incomplete self, or just lint in her pocket. Her hour will also come with the breaking of water.”
Rosmarie Waldrop, Lawn of Excluded Middle, 1993
“the body is a text but not all text supports the body, so i think that’s the sacred work of poetry— to use text to create new bodies to read from.” jayy dodd, interview with Devin Kelly, 2017
ceremonial garb for underground cryptids
Architectural: a barn loom is a building—often literally salvaged barn timber—remade into a new container, a cubic machine for tension and the intersection of other lines of force
we teach others how to speak
like this, with twirls
of knuckle
and wrists aloft
wrestling with
wrought hunks of wood—
we push, they pummel, we
catch, they rose.
thrumming halos slack off
their lift, accumulated
protein time, like feathered
clockwork. i taught
you how to whisper
with the soles of
your bare feet,
so that in your patient
physicality you
will begin to listen
to your loom,
truer weaver than i’ll
ever be— more divinely purposed,
more venerably practiced,
engulfing you as she
engulfs sun-wet breves of
dust
cause that’s what you
make, and her too.
flowing with fervent oils,
our hard bodies touching,
hocketing a song of tension
in centennial cantos:
memory in age— sense fibrally— inside her, spirit—
codified alike— transduced diagonals
what does a loom dream about?
Musical: the tensioned parallel threads of the warp strum like a piano or a harp; the overhung lay or beater swings with its own weight like a metronome; you keep a rhythm and follow a melody
“The way out, as Fanon has said, ‘Besides ontogeny, there is sociogeny.’ He is giving us a description of ourselves because then we can ask, ‘What is the mode of sociogeny in which we are?’ Do you see? Because we have been doing it. We have been putting it in place but we have been doing this nonconsciously, as a spider spins its elegant web. But the fact is that we have also been changing these conceptions (of the human). All the great movements of history have actually been changes and struggles against (the prevailing) conception.” Sylvia Wynter, “Race and Our Biocentric Belief System,” 2000
“I don’t mean to get all
Parallel universey on you
But I am at once the spider
The spider web, and
Me observing them” Bernadette Mayer, “I Am Proactive Ephemeral Epiphytic Residue” in Works & Days, 2016
making home in the ruins of an abandoned mining asteroid
Choreographic: adjusting angles of knees, tweaking trajectories of hands, shifting centers of gravity, repeating gestures until they're fine-tuned and muscle-memorized, melting into the repetitions
weaving is how i tell others the things i don't know how to say
“Might web-building best articulate (from concatenation to skeletalization) the act of extending bodily substance through sexual transition; that is to ask, does webbing, and the capacity to weave, describe how transsexuality is also an expression of the body (from sociopolitical to psychical to corporeal) as an address and as a habitat? Expressivity of transsexuality is not a trivialization of a difficult process; on the contrary, transition (or transposition) is an arrangement between the sensorial milieu of the self and the profusion of the world.” Eva Hayward, “Spiderwomen,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty, edited by Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, 2017
Orders of Magnitude: a 5-year-old practice in a 50-year-old school in a 300-year-old tradition in a 50,000-year-old craft
Computational: the loom handles memory, logic, input and output, and programmatic rules, augmenting the weaver's brain, producing complexity
contact with alien forces but it's not ominous or sober; it's joking, cajoling, and teasing
textiles that transport you to another world the same way as the books in Myst
“But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.” Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”
sometimes the web feels impenetrable— wait for an opening
“You know when you see a cool designer on IG and u click on link in bio but their website has no shop and instead is 5 paragraphs of thesis ‘this project was born from the need to explore humans in relation to—’
That’s the kind of gorgeous dead end I aspire to be w my thirst traps” julio torres, tweet, may 2, 2020
