The View from the Factory
by Susan Gordon Lydon
Lou, my closest friend, comes over to visit, but there's nowhere for her to sit. Every available chair is taken up with pieces of knitting in varying stages of completion. I am doing what I call production knitting, working on five or so projects all at the same time. It's a laugh, really, my ability to produce. This work is extremely labor intensive; it takes so much time for me to finish the same garment a machine could spit out in minutes that it's ludicrous to think of what I do, my feeble two-handed activity, as "production."Never mind, though, because I'm knitting every moment of the day, throwing off by-products like a smelter. The intensity of my knitting matches the intensity of my writing. There's some kind of symbiosis here, though I'd be hard-pressed to explain just how it works. During a time of feverish activity composing first-draft material for a book, I'm also producing: songs, poems, articles, and sweaters, plus a journal I've named "The Zombie Chronicles," whose contents should be obvious from its title. My creativity is gushing like a river at flood tide, and I can't really direct its flow. My mind works so fast I can't keep up; that's why I have to start so many projects and then race around trying to make progress on all of them at once.
Master knitter or demon knitter? You be the judge.
I'm also an impatient knitter, which should be an oxymoron but in my case isn't. I embark on a project involving hundreds of thousands of stitches, and then I'm in a hurry to get them all done. My impatience is the reason I hate to rip out. It also makes me want to begin knitting the moment I bring my yarn home from the store. These days I force myself to make swatches for gauge, but believe me, it wasn't always so. Lord, why should such an impatient person be knitting in the first place? Why not race cars? Or bake cookies? Do something you actually can finish in twenty minutes? As the Yiddish expression goes, nicht bashert: it wasn't meant to be.
So I'm forced to suspend time. To work outside of time. To forget that time exists. On a subconscious level I have to believe that I have all the time in the world, or I wouldn't be able to begin. And something happens when I entertain that fallacy. Time, which is fractal, stretches out, and I begin to experience eternity. There is something about that spacious expansion into endless time that promotes the growth of large-scale thinking, that enables one to rise above the petty stresses of everyday life. Viewed from a certain perspective, time is the only real luxury we have.
From The Knitting Sutra by Susan Gordon Lydon (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).
Copyright © 1997 by Susan Gordon Lydon
Used by arrangement with HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
