Evensong XII (27 March 2024)

We were in Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Station, and I was knitting a tank top out of brushed Italian silk. It was three weeks before Christmas and one week after she and I stopped speaking about anything other than the holiday market, the knitwear we were making to sell in our booth, how those sales were going.

The straps on the tank were too long because I was knitting while standing. The weight of the garment was expanding the fibers, something akin to the way a garment’s shape conforms to the shape of a body. There are contours, there is stretch. There is tension.

An ivory brushed Italian silk tank top draped over a retail counter. Beneath the silk tank is a variety of colorful merino wool hand knits.

I was knitting but I wasn’t paying attention. I was too hot. Sweating. My button-down top was damp and clinging to me; my hair plastered to my temples and the back of my neck. This wasn’t the menopause brand of sweating, which is a distinctly internal chemical reaction to fluctuating hormones. These columns of heat rising up in the same way I imagine a separate, unique weather system rises inside a wildfire that burns hotter and longer, across a broader surface area than can be contained.

I was too hot because something happened to the heating system in the train station. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the opening weekend of the holiday market, the heating system broke down completely and it was as cold inside as it was outside. The engineers scrambled to correct the issue, which resulted in the heat coming on full blast. All of the vendors were sweating. The crowds swelled with each train arrival and it got hotter.

People shuffled by our booth, red-faced, chugging water, looking with confusion at the scarves and hats. The cashmere, the alpaca, the merino. They’d just shake their heads and keep it moving. Too hot to even think about a sweater.

There is tension. There is heat.

The fibers expanded. The tank was like a yawn that had no conclusion, a misshapened puddle of delicate-looking fibers that had a dreamy softness to the touch. I kept knitting even though it would need to be frogged and reworked, the rhythm of stitching holding me in time and space. It was the perfect analog to my life, in which nothing else was really working out even though I had all the right materials, skills, and fundamental knowledge.

From October through the end of the year I was supposed to be living in the knitting studio, which was really an unauthorized sublet of a fifth floor walkup in the West Village. The informal agreement I made with C before returning to NYC from LA was that I’d crash in the studio for the holiday season, pay a partial rent, work in the booth and knit inventory along with a team of eight other artists. Except when I got back to NYC I found other artists staying in the apartment, too. It was a studio, both in definition of living space and an active work space. Too small to accommodate so many bodies, I scrambled to find another place to stay. Tension is a thing, indeed.

The mechanical buzz of the knitting machines and congenial chatter of the other fiber artists was a source of joy. I was reminded of Remedios Varo’s painting Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, which I had visited at the Art Institute of Chicago on my drive back from Los Angeles in September. I had been in conversation with this painting, with all of her work, in my mind for many years. The Chicago exhibition felt like an important moment as I stood in front of what Varo made, finally, and let the work impress upon me physically the importance of continuing to realize my visions, no matter the cost.

Bordando el manto terrestre (Embroidering the Earth's Mantle)
Remedios Varo Spanish 1961

There will always be tension. Walk the taut line to the other side of the dream. Move toward the heat of it. See what’s there.

The holiday market closed on December 24th. Was it the end of a dream? The vision breaks like a fever, minor parts of me bead at my crown and evaporate. Tension is required to make art; there must be something to push and to pull, a tangle of an idea from which to tease out its meaning, consider the form that meaning might take to best convey the idea. For me it could be language, it could be notes on a scale, it could be gesture. It could be paper. It could be cotton or silk or wool. It could be linen to wrinkle and cool. From one moment to the next there is a line holding steady, sometimes it tightens and sometimes there’s slack. But there’s always a line that I’m burning across.