floweryhedgehog (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
floweryhedgehog) wrote2019-11-15 09:29 am
floweryhedgehog) wrote2019-11-15 09:29 am
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My brain has been doing that thing where it zips from one connection to another faster than I can brew a pot of tea and start up my writing software. I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we make, the meaning we make by making those things. Or the things we make my making the meaning.
My brother Zack wanted to know about weaving. How the loom works to make the structure and the patterns that make up the fabric. He was fascinated by the whole process, and since I am similarly enchanted by the whole thing I am happy to try to explain, and describe, and demonstrate. I love this stuff. It is endlessly fascinating and the closer you look the more magical it is.
And it got me thinking about how deeply we as humans seem to need pattern and order, so much so that when given a tangle, we seek always to unravel it, and when given the formless potential of a smooth ball of yarn, we seek new ways to create more complex order out of it. We are hard wired to push back against entropy.
I think we do the same thing with stories, the way we string together sequences of events in a way that creates meaning. We do it with the stories of our real lives, look at events that aren’t inherently linked and draw the connections between them. We do it with the stories we invent, digging for the profound truths at the heart of things that never really happened.
Ursula LeGuin was particularly good at this. In her fantasy, language and magic were entangled on the quantum level like the two ends of an ansible. In her science fiction, the soaring heights of technical achievement could be reached only when people wove their lives and civilizations together to create a cohesive meaning, spoke the True Words that would make what they said true.
Ursula LeGuin knew that it was all one thing: magic, story, galactic civilization, language…we reach for pattern and complexity. The first thing we did when we looked up at the heavens was find the pictures in the stars, and the stories in the pictures, and we’ve been trying to make sense out of everything we’ve encountered since.
Which is how knitting and weaving and stories and magic are all kind of the same thing.
My brother Zack wanted to know about weaving. How the loom works to make the structure and the patterns that make up the fabric. He was fascinated by the whole process, and since I am similarly enchanted by the whole thing I am happy to try to explain, and describe, and demonstrate. I love this stuff. It is endlessly fascinating and the closer you look the more magical it is.
And it got me thinking about how deeply we as humans seem to need pattern and order, so much so that when given a tangle, we seek always to unravel it, and when given the formless potential of a smooth ball of yarn, we seek new ways to create more complex order out of it. We are hard wired to push back against entropy.
I think we do the same thing with stories, the way we string together sequences of events in a way that creates meaning. We do it with the stories of our real lives, look at events that aren’t inherently linked and draw the connections between them. We do it with the stories we invent, digging for the profound truths at the heart of things that never really happened.
Ursula LeGuin was particularly good at this. In her fantasy, language and magic were entangled on the quantum level like the two ends of an ansible. In her science fiction, the soaring heights of technical achievement could be reached only when people wove their lives and civilizations together to create a cohesive meaning, spoke the True Words that would make what they said true.
Ursula LeGuin knew that it was all one thing: magic, story, galactic civilization, language…we reach for pattern and complexity. The first thing we did when we looked up at the heavens was find the pictures in the stars, and the stories in the pictures, and we’ve been trying to make sense out of everything we’ve encountered since.
Which is how knitting and weaving and stories and magic are all kind of the same thing.