What follows is from the opening paper that I've just submitted to my supervisor (the paper that has had a lot of to do my nonappearance here of late...), called 'Making Things'. It draws a lot on some posts in this blog, so I hope you'll forgive the repetition. I'm also posting it as part of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, which I really want to take part in after reading Karie's beautiful post.
January is always an unpleasant month, and this year’s was particularly cold and dark, but for me it was considerably brightened by the ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ programmes on Radio Four, part of a wider BBC and British Museum project. The programmes, narrated by the British Museum curator Neil McGregor, aim to ‘tell the story of our world through the things human beings have made over the last two million years,’ in partnership with web and community-based initiatives encouraging people to think about the historical and social significance of the things they own and use. I already liked the concept of the series, of understanding history through the stuff we make, because my love of knitting extends to an interest in textile crafts and their social history. And because there is something especially transportative and memorable about things, objects that can be touched, stroked, held, even if one never actually gets to hold them. It is in the odd little folk museums in rural locations around the country, run as labours of love by slightly eccentric locals, that one comes across the coal scuttles, wool carders, tobacco tins, harnesses, butter churns, that give glimpses into the daily lives of ordinary people from the past.
Yet these are artefacts from the relatively recent past, and listening to the second instalment of the ‘100 Objects’ series, I was astonished by the beauty and humanity of the thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘swimming reindeer’ sculpture, carved from mammoth tusk towards the end of the Ice Age. Looking on the website at the image of that carving, I felt a doorway open to thirteen thousand years ago, to the incredible quiet and harsh cold, to someone sitting by a river, watching the play of light of the water, the reindeer in mating season, whittling at a bit of tusk. Even that long ago, people found moments in which to live, not just survive, to see the beauty in the world around them, and make beautiful things to represent it.
Thus I was particularly receptive to the deep velvety tones of Archbishop Rowan Williams, explaining on the programme what the swimming reindeer piece says to him about art and spirituality:
For a large proportion of my life I have just not wanted to be here: from about the age of eleven, for me the world was charged with horror. A number of factors have been involved with the gradual easing of my depression since my late teens, but it was through teaching myself to knit in particular that the world has become re-enchanted again. One day when I was eighteen I decided, quite at random, to have a rummage through my mum’s old knitting needles and wool, and try and remember that which my grandmother taught me when I was six. With a bit of struggle, and my mum’s help, I did, and I made a scarf for my sister, then one for my friend Jess (purling as well!), then one for myself (made up of patches trying out lots of different stitches), which I still wear, then I made my friend Rosie a ‘Mini-Rosie’ doll, and since then I’ve carried on knitting and never stopped.
I am not sure why knitting, rather than any other craft, has so engaged me: I suppose because of its rhythmic, meditative nature; the fact that it employs some parts of the brain, but leaves the others free to concentrate on other things; the usefulness and enjoyableness of its products (clothes!), and that it can be simultaneously original and part of a long tradition. If something goes wrong, or is not working out as planned, knitting is quite easy to unravel and start again. Whilst a rather skewed perfectionism means that my other creative activities of writing and drawing/painting are fraught with the danger that if the end product is not very good I will feel like a useless human being, I am not nearly so bothered if a knitting project turns out hideously. I suppose this is because of the lesser status that knitting has as a creative art, it is less associated with the ego. My knitting has been a sustaining comfort and distraction during particularly difficult times, and more than anything it gives me a general sense of purpose; a structure to my life that might otherwise have been lacking. I always have something to do that I enjoy, something that keeps me engaged, and because I used not to enjoy anything much at all, that is very valuable. Being someone who makes material things has made me more attuned than I was to the beauty of the world, and able to value beauty for its own sake. Knitting has helped me to become at home in the world, when depression made me want to leave the world, and Christianity told me that I should look beyond the world, that it was not of ultimate importance.
In evangelical Christian circles, individuals share their ‘testimony,’ the narrative of how they became a Christian. Many gay people also have a ‘coming out story’. There seems something terribly silly about this knitter’s version of a coming out story, or testimony. But I’ve had those other stories, those other significant turning points of my life, and, ridiculous as it seems, I think that knitting may actually have been just as significant for my mental and spiritual health as becoming a Christian and accepting my sexuality. Yet why is that so surprising, so ‘silly’ or ‘ridiculous’? Writers often say far more solemn things about the impulse to write, musicians to play, artists to paint. Is it blasphemous, that making things out of loops of wool has almost certainly been better for me than any number of dogmas of the church? It may be that they—writing, knitting, praying—are not such different things, but all part of the same ‘entering into the flow of life,’ that intuiting of ‘the principle of cohesion underlying it all,’ that Rowan Williams talks about.
And if there still seems something rather silly about valuing knitting as part of the divine flow of life: why? Because (the whole) knitting is not art, it does not make statements, it does not have immaterial meanings attached to it? Or because (on the whole) only women knit? This paper, on feminism and the spirituality inherent in making things, has come out of my joy in learning to be ‘at home in the world’ through creating with my hands. It is also the result of my profound irritation that academic theology fails to appreciate the value of small, ‘feminine’ acts of making, such as knitting.
January is always an unpleasant month, and this year’s was particularly cold and dark, but for me it was considerably brightened by the ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ programmes on Radio Four, part of a wider BBC and British Museum project. The programmes, narrated by the British Museum curator Neil McGregor, aim to ‘tell the story of our world through the things human beings have made over the last two million years,’ in partnership with web and community-based initiatives encouraging people to think about the historical and social significance of the things they own and use. I already liked the concept of the series, of understanding history through the stuff we make, because my love of knitting extends to an interest in textile crafts and their social history. And because there is something especially transportative and memorable about things, objects that can be touched, stroked, held, even if one never actually gets to hold them. It is in the odd little folk museums in rural locations around the country, run as labours of love by slightly eccentric locals, that one comes across the coal scuttles, wool carders, tobacco tins, harnesses, butter churns, that give glimpses into the daily lives of ordinary people from the past.
Yet these are artefacts from the relatively recent past, and listening to the second instalment of the ‘100 Objects’ series, I was astonished by the beauty and humanity of the thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘swimming reindeer’ sculpture, carved from mammoth tusk towards the end of the Ice Age. Looking on the website at the image of that carving, I felt a doorway open to thirteen thousand years ago, to the incredible quiet and harsh cold, to someone sitting by a river, watching the play of light of the water, the reindeer in mating season, whittling at a bit of tusk. Even that long ago, people found moments in which to live, not just survive, to see the beauty in the world around them, and make beautiful things to represent it.
Thus I was particularly receptive to the deep velvety tones of Archbishop Rowan Williams, explaining on the programme what the swimming reindeer piece says to him about art and spirituality:
What I think you see in the art of this period is human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life around them, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that's going on around them, in a way which I think isn't just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting or whatever. I think it's more than that. It's really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and I think that that's actually a very deeply religious impulse, to be at home in the world.That phrase explaining the human desire to make things—‘to be at home in the world’—resonated with me, and stayed with me. Not only did it seem to be a good way to describe the spiritual significance of daily acts of making in the writing of Michèle Roberts’s (whom I am working on in my thesis): it also helped to explain what ‘making things’ has meant to me.
[...]
With that, and in your identification with the processes of the world, you begin to understand or intuit what in the 'Old Testament' is called 'wisdom', a kind of principle of cohesion or cohesiveness underlying it all, and you identify that eventually with the mind of God.
For a large proportion of my life I have just not wanted to be here: from about the age of eleven, for me the world was charged with horror. A number of factors have been involved with the gradual easing of my depression since my late teens, but it was through teaching myself to knit in particular that the world has become re-enchanted again. One day when I was eighteen I decided, quite at random, to have a rummage through my mum’s old knitting needles and wool, and try and remember that which my grandmother taught me when I was six. With a bit of struggle, and my mum’s help, I did, and I made a scarf for my sister, then one for my friend Jess (purling as well!), then one for myself (made up of patches trying out lots of different stitches), which I still wear, then I made my friend Rosie a ‘Mini-Rosie’ doll, and since then I’ve carried on knitting and never stopped.
I am not sure why knitting, rather than any other craft, has so engaged me: I suppose because of its rhythmic, meditative nature; the fact that it employs some parts of the brain, but leaves the others free to concentrate on other things; the usefulness and enjoyableness of its products (clothes!), and that it can be simultaneously original and part of a long tradition. If something goes wrong, or is not working out as planned, knitting is quite easy to unravel and start again. Whilst a rather skewed perfectionism means that my other creative activities of writing and drawing/painting are fraught with the danger that if the end product is not very good I will feel like a useless human being, I am not nearly so bothered if a knitting project turns out hideously. I suppose this is because of the lesser status that knitting has as a creative art, it is less associated with the ego. My knitting has been a sustaining comfort and distraction during particularly difficult times, and more than anything it gives me a general sense of purpose; a structure to my life that might otherwise have been lacking. I always have something to do that I enjoy, something that keeps me engaged, and because I used not to enjoy anything much at all, that is very valuable. Being someone who makes material things has made me more attuned than I was to the beauty of the world, and able to value beauty for its own sake. Knitting has helped me to become at home in the world, when depression made me want to leave the world, and Christianity told me that I should look beyond the world, that it was not of ultimate importance.
In evangelical Christian circles, individuals share their ‘testimony,’ the narrative of how they became a Christian. Many gay people also have a ‘coming out story’. There seems something terribly silly about this knitter’s version of a coming out story, or testimony. But I’ve had those other stories, those other significant turning points of my life, and, ridiculous as it seems, I think that knitting may actually have been just as significant for my mental and spiritual health as becoming a Christian and accepting my sexuality. Yet why is that so surprising, so ‘silly’ or ‘ridiculous’? Writers often say far more solemn things about the impulse to write, musicians to play, artists to paint. Is it blasphemous, that making things out of loops of wool has almost certainly been better for me than any number of dogmas of the church? It may be that they—writing, knitting, praying—are not such different things, but all part of the same ‘entering into the flow of life,’ that intuiting of ‘the principle of cohesion underlying it all,’ that Rowan Williams talks about.
And if there still seems something rather silly about valuing knitting as part of the divine flow of life: why? Because (the whole) knitting is not art, it does not make statements, it does not have immaterial meanings attached to it? Or because (on the whole) only women knit? This paper, on feminism and the spirituality inherent in making things, has come out of my joy in learning to be ‘at home in the world’ through creating with my hands. It is also the result of my profound irritation that academic theology fails to appreciate the value of small, ‘feminine’ acts of making, such as knitting.
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