I once heard this was a recipe from the French Revolution, but I could never confirm the authenticity of the reference. Such a crunchy thing seemed like anathema to me, anyway. A theme to be obviated by any means possible for fear of what it may lead either by real ascertainable connections or the capricious means of word association.
Whichever way it was, the thoughts such algorithms evoked soon became a situation more fearful than a frayed ceiling confronting the lady who slept under it — fearing the ceiling’s flawed whiteness might be an actual ghost that she knew at heart could never exist. The click of knitting needles or what sounded to be a click of knitting needles from the opposite side of the otherwise empty bedroom did not help her trying to fall asleep. She was the sort of person who often stayed awake — not to count any sheep whence the knitting wool derived — but to count anxieties and, yes, fears.
There were commonly two kinds of knitting wool — morling and shorling wool, harvested respectively from dead sheep and live sheep. Respectfully done in either instance, she hoped. Half awake, half asleep, her thoughts became affected by both states in overlap, as she returned to the opening theme of pickled fennel. In her mind’s eye, meanwhile, she wound any wool-gathering into a tight ball of it from wide spools of wool, as she once did at the knees of her grandmother, a great knitter as well as a seamstress with a Singer machine. A woman now too old to be alive, having been born in 1899, long after the French Revolution, true, but before algorithms were invented for knitting patterns to be available on line in advance of reaching the needles. Jab jab jab went a smaller needle to the sound of feet on an ancient rusted treadle. The ash growing longer and longer on the cigarette in her mouth, as the old woman fed the material through with her fingers.
But that made no sense of the opening theme. Any coda needed a more difficult unravelling of the movements in the room around her so as to arrive back at the start. Some said ‘ravel’ and ‘unravel’ had the same meaning, but she had never understood that. Her mouth was now untidily crunchy with a strange spicy substance not unlike old chew-baccy. The Queen of Hearts smiled.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.” – Alice in Wonderland
(Written today)
Whichever way it was, the thoughts such algorithms evoked soon became a situation more fearful than a frayed ceiling confronting the lady who slept under it — fearing the ceiling’s flawed whiteness might be an actual ghost that she knew at heart could never exist. The click of knitting needles or what sounded to be a click of knitting needles from the opposite side of the otherwise empty bedroom did not help her trying to fall asleep. She was the sort of person who often stayed awake — not to count any sheep whence the knitting wool derived — but to count anxieties and, yes, fears.
There were commonly two kinds of knitting wool — morling and shorling wool, harvested respectively from dead sheep and live sheep. Respectfully done in either instance, she hoped. Half awake, half asleep, her thoughts became affected by both states in overlap, as she returned to the opening theme of pickled fennel. In her mind’s eye, meanwhile, she wound any wool-gathering into a tight ball of it from wide spools of wool, as she once did at the knees of her grandmother, a great knitter as well as a seamstress with a Singer machine. A woman now too old to be alive, having been born in 1899, long after the French Revolution, true, but before algorithms were invented for knitting patterns to be available on line in advance of reaching the needles. Jab jab jab went a smaller needle to the sound of feet on an ancient rusted treadle. The ash growing longer and longer on the cigarette in her mouth, as the old woman fed the material through with her fingers.
But that made no sense of the opening theme. Any coda needed a more difficult unravelling of the movements in the room around her so as to arrive back at the start. Some said ‘ravel’ and ‘unravel’ had the same meaning, but she had never understood that. Her mouth was now untidily crunchy with a strange spicy substance not unlike old chew-baccy. The Queen of Hearts smiled.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.” – Alice in Wonderland
(Written today)