Intertwined, Interlaced, Interlocking

For a while now she had been noticing that the same object or phrase had been recurring. At first it hadn't bothered her, but gradually it had become almost annoying. It was annoying because she wasn't able to explain it. Why would things that were somehow tied together be popping up in her life now? 

Just thinking about the coincidental appearances gave her goosebumps. (It wasn't a term she liked, but the truth was she felt her skin crawl. Her shoulders shivered, in the way they had when her grandmother had warned her about walking home on the old slate sidewalk that had somehow survived the town's cosmetic repairs: 'Step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back. Step on a line, you'll break your mother's spine.')

Nobody normal would want to harm their mother in that fashion, she thought. She loved her mother and always tried to avoid those imperfections when she was walking to or from school, and even when she was roller-skating, clackety-clack, on that same sidewalk. She never figured out why her grandmother had insisted on repeating the words that pretty much made her afraid to take steps forward. She couldn't imagine how she'd feel if her mother cried out in pain at the damage to her vertebrae...

******

Cassandra - usually called Cass - was years away from that unfortunate warning from a woman who had disappeared before the little girl had really gotten to know her. That didn't mean she couldn't envision those marks that marred her path, made her question so many things while she was growing up. There was something to those lines, some jagged and very fine, others curving. They seemed to appear from nowhere and disappear, having appeared on the old slate slabs like so much nonsensical writing. They must have meant something.

The thing was, the cracks and lines had given way to other marks on surfaces that seemed to move in ever-mingling configurations. They were always there, and had arisen from the path to a more invasive status, like the bittersweet vines with orange, pithy stems like steel that nobody should have imported from rural parts of Asia to urban America. 

The ubiquitous lines had risen and were now ubiquitous threads. They had woven themselves around Cass, distracting her, challenging her to treat them well. Had woven more and more tightly, when she was not paying attention.

Cass had gone into a shop in Portland out of curiosity. It was a quaint little fiber shop and was full of color. It hadn't been planned, but she left with an intense desire to take up weaving. An ancient, stunning craft, requiring great skill to produce the best pieces. Cass had simply had to follow the colors, the types of wool, the techniques and tools of the weavers and spinners. 

Soon after, Penelope began to reveal her presence.

"This poem is impossible to read. The syllables get stuck in my throat," complained Cass as she read from a book by Sylvia Anson.

"I'm having trouble catching my breath," she moaned, after she had gone on to an anthology of stories published the previous year. She had run into Penelope and her weaving again. That was before she found the novel The Penelopiad by Margaret Steurrys, no Margaret Atwood, on a shelf at home. She couldn't remember ever buying it or setting it in that place. The mythological wife who fends off her suitors during her husband's absence by saying she must finish her tapestry before she can remarry, then proceeds to rip out the fabric every night.

"The Greeks had such an elaborate explanation for the way the world was being run, by gods, demi-gods, and many figures with super powers." Cass marveled at how the ancients were able to keep their deities and their offspring straight. She was pondering the Greek imagination when visiting the newly reopened art museum in town. Antiquity was amply represented in its collection.

"What are these women doing?" she asked, looking at a marble statue with the title of Fates Moirae. Immediately, she was sorry she'd asked, because of course the Three Fates were the ones in charge of spinning the fabric of life, then measuring it and distributing it, and finally, cutting the fabric, ending its existence. Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Manipulating fibers to create threads, assign the weavings the task of life, then ending it with a snip of sharp metal blades.

In another part of the museum there was a painting, probably by a Flemish master, of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. The myth had transcended its time and place of origin, taking with it the element of the thread, often red, that Ariadne offered Theseus and that would take him to freedom.

"I'm suffocating!" cried Cass, to nobody in particular. It felt like instead ofo strings or threads, she had a rope around her neck. She was caught in the spider's web of references. They were tightening their hold on her, just by their constant manifestations.

Naturally, these thoughts were no more than the product of an active imagination, and Cass finally relaxed, having seem no ties - pun? - to threads or weaving anywhere. Then she let her guard down and was scrolling through her Facebook feed when she noticed the wall of a good friend, Xana, who was from Galicia, the northwestern portion of the Iberian Peninsula. Cass had visited for a few weeks and had even managed to read a couple of the best-known writers. Xana had a quote by one of those writers in her profile:

Tecín soia a miña tea.

"I wove my cloth alone," Cass translated the line from Rosalía de Castro. "Or, I did my weaving all by myself." 

Why this line and not another of the thousands of perfect lines in Galician poetry? It was like they were all coming for her, all those threads, bent on strangling her, tying her up like a prisoner, her hands bound at the wrists, behind her back. Yet there was nothing of the kind happening.

A short while later, Cass was looking up something like the exact geographical location of Babylonia or Bavaria when a link led her to the term palimpsest. A quick glance told her what it was: the type of old document that had been used once, then refurbished and reused for new treatises or historical accounts. Layers upon layers, like clothing we put on when it's very cold and we are obliged to leave the house. Like clothing, the layers of parchment or animal skin might eventually reveal what lay beneath.

Except that the palimpsest has more fragile fibers to pull back for the person who wants to see what was originally on the pages. Something told Cass that the meandering of her thoughts was causing them to wind more and more tightly around her. Disappearing figure on a page, like the face barely visible on the cloth that had washed the face of Christ (for those who believe that cloth is authentic).

Paper. Fibers. Cloth.The thread of life, threatening to snap, fray, strangle. Cass was feeling the world like a mass of hairs belonging to some monster. She shook her head and was determined to put the thoughts of asphyxiation out of her head. Then she looked down at Xana's page, still filling the screen of her laptop:

"Encaixe de Camariñas," mused Cass. She still had fond memories of a visit to the little fishing village of Camariñas and watching the agility of the women making bobbin lace by the sea, their homemade 'pillows' stuffed with scratchy hay and resting on their knees. The lace required threads that were wound in the opposite direction from normal threads and strings. The creators of the lace know exactly what they are doing, but the inexperienced observer is dumbstruck by the sea of lines, bobbins, and common pins strewn across the pillow.

The labyrinthine pattern cascading down the rustic pillow always seemed worse than the one with the Minotaur.

Cass was beginning to lose hope. The ties that bound her were tightening. She sought distraction in her art studio and tried to do some prints with layers. A quick search of Youtube videos produced numerous links for using gelatin plates, along with many references to layering colors, textures, shapes. Layering was the key word. Put something on top of something else, but don't erase what was originally there. Pull a print with multiple layers of old paint, old memories of other colors that had once resided front and center on the soft plate.

The videos needed to edit out the part about the layers.

Crocheting, once a mindless activity at the end of the day, began to make Cass very anxious. She knew what she was doing when she manipulated the yarn with all its fibers into a sweater, bag, or scarf. She was weaving, entangling, tying knots. Part of her remained behind in every tiny stitch: single crochet, half double crochet, double Cass, triple crochet, half triple Cass... The recipient wouldn't ever know this, which was fortunate, or the crocheted item might feel rather creepy when put on.

Things began to unravel, little by little. This was in direct contrast to the tightening sensation. To this Cass added the pain of a needle - a pain that can occur when needle felting some of the precious hand-dyed roving from the fiber shop. Or when trying to mend clothing. Or even a heart.

Paper. The one used to paint bold flowers on or as a surface to stack design on top of design, latering them thoughtfully so as not to produce what in the art world might be called 'mud'. It can be made by hand.

By hand. The calming effect of constructing with hands, turning fibers into a flat surface for inscription, or of using the hands for untangling and retangling. With the synchronicity of all the fibers, the ways the fingers can manipulate them, Cass is drowning, feeling pulled in too many directions.

The old cracks and lines are back. Actually, they may have always been there, slithering and slinking around the little girl, then creeping up the backs of the legs of the young woman, implanting themselves inside the brain of Cass, who wants them gone yet fears for her life without their safety net.

The threads that go from one place to another, from shate to shape to shape, are making things more and more complex. The person, a person like Cass and there are more like her, comes to welcome the tight grip the meridians, warps, wefts, straight edges and paisleys have applied to her. They have become a maze no thread can help her escape from, even if it is red in color. 

Questions have become complex. We are asked somethings, and must pick our way through the possible responses, dance through the mine field of possible connections to select what we want to say. As we age, there are more and more strings attached to us and to our lives. 

The challenge is to go about simplifying what is hopelessly worn, frayed (on the verge of breaking) To keep believing, even just a little bit, in free will - as opposed to the machinations of the gods - and our ability to live an orderly life. Or, on the contrary, to believe in the possibility of breaking free from all the Lilliputians who try to tie us down with ropes and little stakes, to keep us from moving freely like the grandmotherly advice.

"I can't," wails Cass. She knew, too, that if she tried to liberate herself from the little marks on the slate, cut like pages in a book, disaster might ensue. What remained to be discovered was whether the cocoon had been spun for her or whether she had created her own. Was she better off safely tucked away in that cocoon, or freed from it? Did all the threads in her life, some synchronous and others not, tie things together, or did they plan to further seduce her into servitude?

Somebody wrote that a series of synchronicities are actually a sign that a person is doing something right, is on the right path. Maybe we create our own meaningful coincidences. 

********

After tossing and turning for far too many nights, Cass decided she was not going to let the Fates decide for her, regardless of the influence they had had in the past. She decided that the threads were a good thing, that they helped bind together the pages that she was, that she was still quite able to take needle, brush, pen into her own hand. She was now planning on making a collage of the scraps that she'd been accumulating, almost hoarding.

That she would create a spectacular collage. That this was the way things would be.

For now.