Holofernes,

You ask me why I’m not writing more.

Maybe I just wasn’t good at writing about people, so the idea of writing about something technical excited me. It had always been this way, perhaps. I wanted to write about that impersonal thing that went on when Glenn Gould played the piano or when a blue-ringed octopus produced its venom without forethought. I studied the structures of poetry and the structures of address which differentiated prose and poetry at the sentence level. I was never interested in plot or character, except in the sense that plot could be understood as a combinatory transformation on some basic crystal structure or that character was likewise limited to a few types upon which one might perform a matrix transformation. I liked Lévi-Strauss and de Saussure, and later on, Freud and Lacan. I liked “genre theory” and “poetics” and “psychoanalysis.” I’ve always been for the impersonal, the abstract, and the particular, but not for a science of any of these things, which I feel is all too common and rife with failure. Maybe this is why I refused to write my dissertation in the end, for I had wanted to do something entirely impersonal, and yet I was required to specialize in a topic, an era, a set of authors, and follow a method. I worshipped particularities and could not write formally about the particularities of the authors I loved, so I resorted to writing my own private impressions in boxes on this website instead. In the practice of knitting, one holds a set of loops on a needle and wraps a fiber around another needle and pushes or pulls the loop made on the second needle through the first loop on the first needle such that the loops become intercalated in a matrix. A knitter incrementally participates in the formation of each stitch, and as such the practice may be understood as repetitive. But in fact it is not the creation of each cardinal stitch which is repetitive but the alternation which might occur if one decides to knit n stitches knitwise (putting the needle through the loop from bottom to top) and m stitches purlwise (putting the needle through the loop from top to bottom, with working yarn held in the front). Alternation between segments of a pattern follows this binary form: 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1… (1x1 rib) while the basic act of making a stitch, incrementally and cardinally, moves along in the form of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, … or if one isn’t counting, a simple 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. This is the sort of thing I would have liked to write about as an academic, but it was impossible in my field to make an entrance into the profession with such banal axiomatic writing. My dissertation advisor criticized my first dissertation chapter as being “a little too axiomatic.”

To me there is something beautiful about the axiomatic, or rather about the anxiety immanent within the axiomatic—I hve in mind Georg Cantor, or Wittgenstein, the first of whom went mad, and the second of whom seemed eccentric, whose madness seemed more adverbial: he was madly in love with logic. These men who needed so much for their cases to be absolutely defined, absolutely built from the ground to the heavens, were the ones who could see, with the greatest sense of how real it was, that which was not and absolutely could not be contained. My own tack on this issue had to do with what Freud called “femininity,” which he often, and to many people’s disagreement, equated with “passivity.” Yet I found this equation, femininity equals passivity, to be absolutely resonant and absolutely wondrous in its capacity to produce negation or denial. It was one of those axioms no one wanted to accept, it seemed, except for a few writers and readers I admired, and I supposed that many women who had never read Freud recognized themselves in it even if the bare statement gave them nothing to add except for some exaggerated form of agreement or disagreement. The weird thing about me, it seemed, was that it didn’t make me anxious to read it, and it gave me very many things to say, things which I believed in and which felt articulate and complex but also easily explicable—things which made me feel that my training in mathematics and literary theory had worked.

During my earliest weeks of lace knitting I came across a woman known online as “a passion for lace”; she was well-known online for her execution of Shetland lace patterns which she would write through a process of reading the stitches on elaborate shawls that had been preserved in museums. She was a master of making replicas, of copying what was essentially legible by anyone with basic knowledge of the mechanisms behind making a hole with a yarnover, an increase with a M1R or M1L, a decrease with an SSK or a K2TOG, and with enough know-how to distinguish the direction of the twists in the latter two “phenotypes” of stitch. In fact, there is a surprising array of methods for making an increase or a decrease—multiple ways of making a stitch left, right, or center-leaning. And a series of increases and decreases and yarnovers in combination can distort the matricial form of a textile so much as to make it difficult to “read” a single line. Her work was therefore difficult, and not at all trivial, but it was impossible not to see the femininity of her work as a process of “copying” or “replicating.” It was all too easy to imagine that what she did was execute a program according to rules she had learned and learned to inhabit, the way a spider spins her web without having a large or complex mind. It was easy to claim that she was a vessel for knowledge that she acted out passively, which is to say that she did not “invent,” but recombine what was already in the nature of possible knots and which was already well-preserved in the ethnographic records of Shetland or Estonian or Orenburg.

And I believed this, but I didn’t believe that this made the work lesser than the work of “art” or “invention.” I had seen the trendiest designs on the knitting aggregator website and somehow felt, after the surges of desire had passed, that the most modern and eccentric designs, the most apparently innovative or the most immediately appealing to my sensibilities at the time, were not as interesting as the work of the lace knitter. The same could be said of the woman who specialized in replicating the designs of mittens and sweaters from Selbu, or the woman who came up with ethnographically-informed fair isle sweaters. One might expect that this fidelity to the already-made might bend towards a conservative glorification of the past, and a corresponding aesthetic drabness or kitsch. But I found the work in the books of Anne Bårdsgard and Alice Starmore far more significant and beautiful than the work of the modern knitwear designers I had previously admired and bought and knit patterns from online. Shetland lace was the logical conclusion of my foray into what I might simply call the “traditional,” and it was its apotheosis insofar as I couldn’t imagine wanting to wear or even produce most of the lace shawls I had seen. I’d even say that they were ugly to me, that they looked “stuffy” and limited by their context, as garments meant only to be worn at weddings and funerals.

Recently, I found a video cut from a BBC segment on Shetland lace, where the women knit in such a way that it seems like they are knitting nothing at all. Maybe this is just an effect of the poor resolution of the video, but the thread is clearly so fine and their movements so rapid that it seems certain that the women are not thinking of anything as they knit. Rather, a complex sequence of events is embedded in another sequence or repetitive segments, and all of this is so well-ingrained in the rhythms of the body that the act of making appears to be entirely passive. It was peak femininity, I thought, the kind of femininity that makes us all anxious, the makes us want to repudiate the image of a woman knitting as “ugly” or “old” or simply “too traditional”; this is the stuff of grandmas, of women past their age of beauty, ugly as a function of time and not in relation to other women, barely-even-noticed and in this sense pure, and beautiful insofar as these women are purely given over to the automatism of the craft, the endangered ethnographic craft of knitting.

I could barely understand the words they were saying as they spoke to the interviewer, and this was perhaps what made them most beautiful to me. They spoke an English which I could not even recognize as ethnic, for it bore no relation to the forms of Continental English I have heard before. It was gnarled, like live oak, but from some place where the rocks and treeless moors bear no relation to the Mediterranean biomes of California or the coniferous boreal forests of the Northeast. It was an English that felt geological, and abstract, in spite of its specificity. Meanwhile, I, at the age of twenty-six, with three boyfriends, realized that there was something I desired that was absolutely feminine but absolutely asexual in what I saw.

Absolutely asexual, if we construe sex to involve a clash between sexed and differentiated beings. My concept of sex is applicable to any situation in which beings who represent for each other some distinction attempt to relate or combine. And I thought, while watching that video and perusing my knitting materials, that knitting involved no such structure of difference crashing against difference, that it involved no difference at all. And that for this reason, I was fascinated by the question of how it might relate to the subject that had formed the vital core of what I had preferred to think about: sexual difference.

Judith