I can still feel the thread digging into my fingers, crevicing my flesh with a new and temporary joint crease. I have a tendency to over tighten caps and screws and generally use more force than is needed, but making oboe reeds requires a lot of force, so much so that my flesh would turn purple and threatened to burst open. In order to keep the cane, the actual reed, on the metal staple (a tapered tube wrapped partially in cork) a great deal of skill—and tension—was needed.
That I was, at one time, able to concentrate and focus on some skillful task such as that is remarkable to me now. I know I am not alone in feeling like my attention is being pulled in every direction at once; that state seems to be the baseline for most these days. I imagine I am similarly not alone in marveling at what I have lost over time, what I can no longer do, what feels impossible now.
It is tempting to try to identify some agent—or agents—behind the unraveling, someone pulling the threads apart. Perhaps there is some animate seamstress altering my garment and I, in my attempts to keep the seams from bursting, am only making the whole process more difficult. Or perhaps that sensation of being pulled apart is the result of being tied and stitched together with everything else, the consequence of each of us tugging in contrary motion.
“I slowly discover that this is a gossamer day. I first see the fine lines stretching from one weed, or grass-stem or rush, to another, sometimes seven or eight feet distant horizontally, and only four or five inches above the water. When I look further, I find that they are everywhere and on everything, sometimes forming conspicuous fine white gossamer webs on the heads of grasses. They are so abundant that they seem to have been suddenly produced in the atmosphere by some chemistry, spun out of air, I know not for what purpose.”
Thoreau, Journal, 31 October 1853
As Thoreau and his sister Sophia drifted slowly down river they noticed the endless fine filaments of spider silk connecting every reed and rush on the bank. But only in a certain light and from a particular perspective could the threads even be perceived.
“These gossamer lines are not visible unless between you and the sun. We pass some black willows now, of course, quite leafless, and when they are between us and the sun, they are so completely covered with these fine cobwebs or lines, mainly parallel to one another, that they make one solid roof, a misty roof, against the sun. They are not drawn taut, but curved downward in the middle, like the rigging of a vessel, the ropes which stretch from mast to mast, as if the fleets of a thousand Lilliputian nations were collected one behind another under bare poles; but when we have floated a few feet farther, and thrown the willow out of the sun’s range, not a thread can be seen on it.”
Thoreau, Journal, 31 October 1853
These are reeds not lashed and secured by synthetic fibers but supple and subtle silk. Perhaps Pan himself was inspired by this phenomena when he fashioned his pipes from his beloved Syrinx.
“What can possess these spiders, thus to run all at once to every the least elevation, and let off this wonderful stream? …Sophia thought that thus, at last, they emptied themselves and wound up, or, I suggested, unwound themselves, cast off their mortal coil.”
Thoreau, Journal, 31 October 1853
There is no hero here, no Theseus to slay the Minotaur, no guiding thread out of the labyrinth. The spiders and their silk instead cover and connect everything, offering themselves as the threads. This labyrinthine web, rather than being some place we try to find our way out of, reveals instead the, “infinite extent of our relations.”
The exhaustion of keeping the tension on those fibers that seem to hold everything together even as they pull apart might be covering up an unquestioned belief that there is some-thing there in the knotted fibers, some gossamer being in the fray solely and heroically responsible for keeping everything taught. Just as the force of the thread made me think my skin would burst open, it similarly feels like I am gripping the filaments of my being-as-I-know-it so tightly that it threatens to tear my seams.
“The Minotaur was the god of mutability and movement. He represented the fluid, pleasureful interface between human beings and the animate world of everything else.”
Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand
When the guiding thread I cling to unravels where will I find myself? Who will I be knitted to after my unspooling? What will be exposed when the lunar horns of the Minotaur tears open my fabric? If I allow myself to be caught within the web of infinite relations, to weave myself into that fabric while simultaneously allowing my edges to fray and multiply, thus increasing the possible connections to the world, what then?
The animate everything is perhaps confined by the misuse of these fibers. There were times, especially in the beginning of learning how to tie reeds, when I would tighten the thread too much and the reed, while securely attached, was restricted its ability to vibrate. If the reed could not freely vibrate the sound it produced—if it could produce any at all—was dead and flat.
The yarn of Theseus led him to the Minotaur, that interface between human and more-than-human, into the infinite web of relations. Perhaps being lost in the labyrinth then is not some condition in which we must escape, some fate to be avoided, but the beginning of our undoing and unraveling, the necessary condition that binds us to the other, to the animate everything.
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Thoreau, Walden