Red Jean, image by Maria Damon
III
DE RAGUEUR: EMBROIDERING THE POSSIBLE*
from INTERTEXTILE:
TEXT IN EXILE:
Shmata Mash-Up
A Jewette for Two
Voices
Maria Damon and Adeena Karasick
the dissimulation of the woven texture
can…take centuries to undo its web.
Jacques Derrida
All yarned about and yearned for –
from flax to linen, paper to book, to black ash to sparks of
light
lines, lineaments spun animates, laminates of
delineated limned innards of filament rinses
we enter deep inside
inside the body of the words
rummage inside its textual guts: haruspex
For the Latin terms haruspex, haruspicina are from an
archaic word haru "entrails, intestines" (cognate with hernia
"protruding viscera", and hira "empty gut"; PIE *ǵʰer-) and
from the root spec- "to watch, observe." The Greek ἡπατοσκοπία hēpatoskōpia
is from hēpar "liver" and skop- "to examine."
And in re-examining: sheep organ as oracle
Organum organic oracle gauzy orgasmic grassy origami
we fold words, letters, text, bodies
reminded of how inside the mirage is the RAG
inside the haruspex, the spectre,
of semes, memes, seems, seams, screens, screams,
mis-en-abyme
endless ribboning
and shmata shows us how the text becomes an infinite field of organic symbology anchored in history and innovation
tradition and
traduitioni. Drenched in not Rabbinic law, but ribbonic law
for it is said, “the
ribboni is mistress of herself
She has no master in
her world
But instead re-wraps
the fabric of many generations,
processing them into
treasures of liberated expression.”ii
Culturally re-locating and inter-locuting
all strung out and threadbare
(or wrapped around
your little finger)
Chew on this thread -- A popular Yiddish bubbe meise (old
wives’ tale) is that it is customary to chew on a piece of thread whenever one
is wearing a garment upon which someone is actively sewing; such as attaching a
button or repairing a seam. For it may lead to the sewing up of one’s brains (“mir
zollen nit farnayen der saychel”). Another Yiddish explanation
for chewing on a thread is that burial shrouds are sewn around the remains of
the deceased. Actively chewing while another is sewing on one’s garments is a
clear indication that one is quite alive and not yet ready to be buried.
Or as in buried meaning when
inside the shmata is hidden in the sham the alternative facts
rethreaded histories, mysteries
when you seem to be pullin’ the wool over my [ ]
in a rag-bag of embroidered positions,
banned. unbound
rag bag 1820, from rag (n.) + bag. sense of "motley
collection" first recorded 1864. ragtag
1820, from rag (n.) + tag; originally “rag-tag and bobtail” "the
rabble" (1659), from bobtail "cur," 1619. Tag and rag was
"very common in 16-17th c." [OED]
like "the dark studded space with stars –with so fine a
needle that ... the sky must be full of wailing-women who at each stitch gave
out a fiery scream" [Jabès]
or how for H.D. each word comprised “so many stitches and
just so many rows”
in the eros of what’s shared between the
shearing and the sheer, cherched
shaar, shir ha shirim;
Spinning Wheels within Wheels.
Like the 231 gates of existence as laid out in the Sefer Yetzirah
(The Kabbalistic 2nd C. Book of Formation), the 231 wheels that reference all the letters
and all their combinations and permutations, all the gematriatic associations,
the blueprint of the creation of the universe and the alchemical draft to
create a golem
According to Rabbi Eliezar
Rokeach in the Book of Formation, to make a Golem, one must
assemble the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and permute them with the
Tetragrammaton, and all the vowels, in the array of the 221 gates of meaning.
Each sequence contains 442 letters, so to complete all 22 letters of the
alphabet, one must use 4862 letters. Each of these letters must be pronounced
with every possible combination of the 5 primary vowels and the 4 letters of
the Tetragrammaton, a total of 9724 pronunciations for each lettered pair. This
means the entire exercise makes use of 486,200 pronunciations. Estimating 4
syllables a second: 11⁄2 hours per sequence resulting in 35 hours to complete
the uninterrupted process.
And through the
recitation of the letters
with no mistake
and no interruption
you will be
adorned in clean white vestmentsiii
And through the
whiteness of the garment
and the garment of
lettered light
shmata you are the
force that activates life
And inside you i am
reciting the weave of your letters
As outlined in
Abulafia’s Or Ha-Shekel
i outline the crown
of the head of each of your letters, the beginning of the beginning down to the
middle of your face, the middle of the beginning, concentrating on the back of
your head, the end of the beginning the beginning of the [ ] And through each curve, swerve of your body,
downward through yr heart abdomen, the base of your spine
i wear you in my
ears and in my eyes
visualizing and
articulating
your twined
And in your mouth is placed
a parchment of
letters
Drafting/drawing out the secret codes
Plying/folding/twisting. Pulling through our pilpul / play
Pilled, plied and parlayed, pilpul: the methodology of Talmudic
study.
Derived from the verb "pilpel" ("to
spice," "to season," and "to dispute violently" or
"cleverly" [Shab. 31a; B. M. 85b]). Since by such disputation the
subject is in a way spiced and seasoned, the word has come to mean penetrating
investigation, disputation, a sophistic method of drawing conclusions.iv
Pulling meaning as lips slip pull splayed through spliced
poly-puns
“Aren’t you that beat-up piece of string?”
“No, i’m a frayed knot”
knotting and reknotting – Not (negative dialectics,
via negativa,
negative space,
dissent,
object/ion),
but the knots of the words, of woven gilded letters
and the Not[ch] of the drop spindle:
drop
spin. pin.
pliant pries
comprising Shaft, Notch and Whorl (low whorl, high whorl)
And commensurate with how Kabbalistically read, the word on
high mirrors the world below; whirling through levels, layers, meaning and
being, the shmata as an intersective nexus, (all hyper-syntactic and
paratactic), an intersubjective and polyreferential signifier the spinning whir
of worlds within worlds, whorls within whorls
in a whorl up se[a]
or a sea
of sh[m]atnez
Shatnez is cloth containing both wool and linen (linsey-woolsey)v which Jewish law, (derived from both Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:5,
22:9-11), prohibits wearing.
It is forbidden to wear wool and linen fabrics in one
garment, as it highlights the interbreeding of different species of animals,
and the planting together of different kinds of seeds.vi
Interestingly,
throughout midrashic and Kabbalistic hermeneutics,
particularly,
in Zoharic interpretations, the lamb is indicative of Yoshkevii –
so, perhaps
the prohibition of mixing wool and linen,
could be
folded into the historically polemical encounter between Jews and Christians
and the
fiercely deep-seated prohibition between the commingling of cultures
However, the
priest's girdle and the tzitzit are preferably made from Shatnez –so one could also read the prohibition as a way of setting
aside this fiber blend
only for holy
purposes.
Some say strictly no mixing –no wool and linen threads
together
no mollusk dyestuffs (murex)
Some say no strict mixing
Some say stringent division
Some say gemishte for the win!
Some say crochet sashay parlay this into that
According to
the Mishnah, the word Shatnez
is an acronym
of:
שע
"combing", טוה "spinning", נז "twisting"
According to the Mishnah, the word Shatnez
is an acronym
of:
The Modern Hebrew word שעטנז means "mixture."
Thus, in the
very mixing of mixing, combing, spinning and twisting, the text and textile
merge, in a confluence of sign and referent, word and thing, through extensions
of extensions, interpretive modalities which embrace conflict and paradox
and all is
re-mixed through the linsey-woolsey warp weft of all that is sacred, secular,
holy and profane; blanketed in your holy knots, frayed and worn
ordinances, spun-struck strands.
***
So, with not a hair out of place, every anomaly erased
the shmata highlights a textured writing –
all that is down
and dirty, gritty and nubby, as streets, walls, rough façades
bumpy and moss-encrusted broken buildings, sidewalks
cracked friezes, rusty and dilapidated
deliciously textured
as Artaud describes the body –
a mad torch, a limp rag of dead sperm
an Ur-text text-ured
an abject fabric tacked on ornate frame
as a martyr stretched on the golden rack
the warp cries against procrustean loom
whereon it’s strung
permeable, raw, soft tissue torn and sewn
the weft transgresses open wounds
only to close them
the bleeding shmata a theatre of cruelty
another turn
another turn
another yearning turn of the front beam
roiling the senses
For texture as ur-text gets your hands dirty, says dig your
fingers in. Nap and patina, oxidized powders, copper excrescence (green from
copper, rust from iron), velvet from satin, slubs from skeins, shine from silk,
roughed-up, abraded fingers leaving spiky threadlets standing up in delight.
And so it is, the shmata exposes a textured writing,
one that is adorned, self-conscious and self-aware, mannerist, exaggerated, a
ravel of complexity: a “poetic” writing that foregrounds itsform. And yet is humble and almost furtive, out-of-the-way
like Jean Genet, whispered from the cracks in prison walls and warming up the
human misery inside, reveling in its eccentricity.
For texture is that which resists: graininess, frictional
pleasure, creating meaning in its micro-challenges (the whorls and eddies of
the fingerprint, nap of velvet). Texture as dirt/patina, the hermeneutic
anomaly, the raised weal of flogged skin, the damask rose on the featherbed
cover. Texture is to touch as timbre is to sound: its connective and collective
tissue-event
And as a haptic auditor
the shmata, is listening, glistening
hears you –
through acoustically crocheted curved space;
spiraling spherical, re-subjectifying
text, texture, weaving the between
the shmata riffs through shifting drifts; riffraff on the
riprap, hiphop on the fly says it’s in the layering, the sampling, the folding, the
labializing and origamizing of the surface. Upthrustings and seismic
distressings of discursive topographies, spirings, abyssings and swirlings of
sumptuous difference, glaring and subtle
reminding us that smoothness is also a texture:
i.e. glatt kosher (the lungs of the slaughtered animal are
smooth,
glatt: not
diseased), more kosher than kosher / of stringent standards
glatt. glut. glas. gliss. gloss. a glossopoeisis
of textured
glossolalia
the shmata asks us to think about texture as roughed-up
disciplinarity,
“scarified inter-disciplinarity.” Rather than the smooth
interdisciplinarity of, say, historicism or the “art and literature of…” model
that predates it, the shmata’s is an interdisciplinarity that tries and plies
and mats itself into the apertures and closures of thinking, inviting and
opening itself to troubled spaces; for in the between is where the ghostly
fingers play against the curtains.
And reminds us that we need not think about smoothness as
facile or glib;
complexity and difficulty are not the only indices of worth.
The simplicity of a Zen koan is in direct proportion to its
opaque enigma,
a stone worn smooth by millennia of oceanic friction.
For as it is said,
"the ocean is
woven"
its smoothness earned by millennia of friction.
marked by smooth grooves --
constellated in the
hollow crucible
of the abyss
as Jabès’ wind-carved shapes of the desert mark the absent
presence
and the smoothest flower seen under a microscope reveals
folds, fissures.
a rough turbulence of snags, snares,
rapt in synthetic syncretics, syntactile and hybrid –
the shmata, all intertextilic and feelin groovy
is an homage to hybridity itself:
From the
early 17th century: Latin hybrida ‘offspring of a tame sow and wild
boar, child of a freeman and slave, etc.,’ hybridity carries the
pejorative connotation of wantonness, lust, unbridled desire; monstrous
indecency; hybrida,’ or (h)ibrida, a hybrid or mongrel [as] commonly
refer[ring] to animals and plants of mixed lineage, “an insult or sexual
outrage, a self-abasing rather than self-aggrandizing cross-species or
cross-caste congress. And with specific reference to lust, hence, an outrage on
nature, a mongrel,” i.e. desire that got out of hand and expressed itself in
what would be considered perverse (cross-species) practices.
And hybrid is related to the Greek hubris, wherein the rash arrogance and punishable
defiance of social norms brings strong or otherwise somewhat admirable men to
their knees.
Or as in improvisational jazz which introduces a textural
mix of polysonic innovation, ancestry, cultures, rhythms, temporalities
–hybrid/High Bird acoustic textures that are “ancient to the future,” the
shmata inscribing a poetics of gemishte
material practices, working within and against well-identified and articulated
traditions, marked by mongrelitudeviii (and like the vehicles aptly
named) combine variant means of propulsion from multiple power sources.
Sartorially re-storied
and notoriously improvisatory
the shmata highlights how improvising is not
about improving, but a nonjudgmental
opening of submission, emission, permission to fail, if by failing to conform
to a regulated aesthetic we stumble on something new. Significantly,
“improvise” and “improve,” though sharing the etymological root “provisus”
–provision, foresight or advantage –, have completely divergent vectors: improvisation
from improvisus (“unforeseen, unexpected”) vs improve from
Latin provisus, from prodest (literally “is in favor of”) “is of advantage,
profitable.” In the first
instance, improvisation,
the “im” is a disclaimer, i.e., not provided for; in the second
instance, improve, it is an
intensification, hyper-provided-for. Hybridity/hubris leads to the
unforeseen
all unpredictable and improvised
between the seen and re-seen
not the mis-en-scène but the missing scene
screamed between the seme and the seam
all that is interjected, bricolaged, diy’ed ‘n jerry-rigged
shmata, you bring an anarchic spirit into the unknown
a palpably erogenous, exogenous
vortiginal Ouroboros of
ramped-up samples, simple amplitudes
leaving you in stitches
sayin’
shmata ta-ta ta-ta touch me
i wanna be dirty
like the Scarlet Letter
reminding us that in recent histories of literacy,
cross-stitched SAMPLERS were used to teach girls the basics
of the alphabet and number system, a way to give them just as much literacy as
they might need, as well as a variety of stitches, appropriate for girls being
interpellated into a housewifely class. Historically recreated cross-stitch
pattern books in use today are among the tools for
inventing highly stylized, defamiliarized
cross-stitch’d, x-stitch vispos:
crossing genres: poetry and the needle arts:
where the needle is homologous to the pen or the arrow, the
shuttle a diminutive spear, the linen surface a version of the screen, the
paper page, reworked papyrus, bark, linen, cotton pulp
weaving desire, history, meaning
through threads, letters, which genealogically are
abstracted forms
derived from images of humble, earthbound, everyday animals
like oxen, camels and fish; things like domestic enclosures,
ladders,
body parts like hands, mouths, or eyes –or a human being at
prayer;
ix
altered shapes which are both visible and invisible,
discernible
in the Roman alphabet but highly attenuated
x
Representations said, unsaid and resaid
in patterns that appear and disappear, hiding
behind other versions of the same letters and sounds,
constituent threads of woven or knit cloth
or as Whitman describes the tide of “manly love”
undergirding
democracy, a “half-hid warp” –threads that sustain and
conjoin the whole,
whose partial invisibility is foundational to its
interwovenness
Without individual threads appearing and disappearing
in front
of and behind each other, no fabric.
Without the interplay of concealment and revelation, no
material.
Without silence, no sound.
Without the so-called negative space surrounding letters on
a page or on the cloth,
no image
Assertion and
erasure, inscription and erosion:
Dissociation and association are quite evident in the structure of
Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah; highlighting how one should continually
untie her knots to the corporeal or material existence, resorting to a
numerical game that demonstrates the equality between heter (untying),
and ha-qesher (binding). Both nouns amount to 605 in the gematria. For
Abulafia, such a device points to the semantic mirroring underscoring the need
for attaching and detaching, how language is sewn and resewnxi
(((((605
also being the gematria of luxurious, mantling,
noble,
glory, lady, mistress,
650 = 5 x
112 )))))
the shmata calls into question fronts, backs, topped
bottoms,
spectral and palimpsested space
mining the manner and the maneuver: the main d’oeuvre (labor)
languaging itself, through the written and spoken
scripted, rescripted, re-encrypted, cut –
For “script,” through P.I.E. sker 1, or ker,
to cut (i.e. “inscribe”), is linked to carnage, scrotum, scurf, skirmish,
scaramouche! Text, in all its manifestations, inscribed on a clay tablet,
stitched or appliquéd into a quilt or woven into a tapestry from which history
can be read by the alphabetically illiterate*, is embedded etymologically and
historically in textiles, from the poetic unit of the “line” (from “linen”) to
the word “clue” (a ball of yarn), or suture/sutra/sew, to the fabric of the
fabrications we construct as our histories
resonant with histology, the study of tissues, histos being the loom, the warp, weft or
woof – woven piece of canvas, by analogy spider web or honeycomb, wand stick,
shinbone, tissue, the issue of the
weaving process –
whose “dissimulation
can in any case take
centuries to undo its web.”xii
the shmata continually reminds us that the granularity of
etymological study is intimately connected to a materialist approach to the
literary, sharpening Walter Benjamin’s admonition that “nothing that has ever
happened” –i.e. no archaic word or practice –“should be lost to history.”xiii
no stone
or grain
of sand
Sappho on papyrus wound around the dead.
Letters as panting dancers; letters alive and throbbing
as vessels of light, riffing threads, paths, whorls
metonymies of lineage and inheritance
and aims in these returns to address that debt
*ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION
“DE RAGUEUR: EMBROIDERING THE
POSSIBLE” is the third section of Adeena Karasick and Maria Damon's 10-year
collaboration, “Intertextile: Text in Exile. Shmata Mashup, a
Jewette for Two Voices," which investigates the relationship between text
and textile. Previous publications and presentations of earlier
sections include: Jacket2, 2016; Habits of Being, ed. Cristina Gorcelli and Paula
Rabinowitz, Minnesota UP, 2015; Open Letter # 20 (Collaborations Issue),
ed. Karl Jirgins, Windsor, ON, 2012; Talisman 48 (Spring 2020). Previous presentations: In(ter)ventions:
Literary Practice at the Edge, Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, AB, CA;
PoemTown, The White River Craft Center, Randolph, VT; Green Point Library,
Brooklyn NY, 2014; University of Minnesota; “post_moot: a 2nd
Convocation of Unorthodox Cultural and Poetic Practices,” Miami University of
Ohio, Oxford, OH; “Fabricadabra,” "Writing the ‘Self’ Back into Jewish
Studies," Association for Jewish Studies Conference, Boston, MA.
NOTES
i. Traduit. Fr. for translation.
ii. For more on the differences between Ribbonim and Rabbonim,
see Ari Elon in Big Jewish Blog, 2005.
iii. According to Rashi (10th C.) commenting on the Talmudic
account explains that Rava made his Golem "by means of the Book of
Formation". “An initiate should not do it alone but should always be
accompanied by one or two colleagues. The Golem must be made of virgin soil,
taken from a place where no man has ever dug. The soil must be kneaded with
pure spring water, taken directly from the ground. If this water is placed in
any kind of vessel, it can no longer be used. The people making the Golem must
purify themselves totally before engaging in this activity, both physically and
spiritually. While making the Golem, they must wear clean white vestments… One
must not make any mistake or error in the pronunciation… no interruption
whatsoever may occur…”
Further outlined by Aryeh Kaplan in his translation and
commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, creating a Golem was primarily not a physical
procedure, but rather, a highly advanced meditative technique. By chanting the
appropriate letter arrays together with the letters of the
Tetragrammaton, the initiate could form a very real mental image of a
human being, limb by limb… Once the conceptual Golem was completed, this
spiritual potential could be transferred to a clay form and actually animate
it. This was the process through which a physical Golem would be brought to
life.
Eleazar of Worms, in his Commentary on Sefer
Yetzirah, that after kneading virgin soil from the mountains with pure water,
the first stage of creation is to form the "limbs" of the golem
("limb", in this case, seems to also represent the torso and head) .
Each limb has a "corresponding letter mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah",
and this letter is to be combined with every other letter of the Hebrew
alphabet to form pairs. Then a more general permutation is done (again for each
limb separately) of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet with every other letter
into letter pairs, "each limb separately". This second, basic method
of combination is called the "221 gates". Then you combine each letter
of the alphabet with each vowel sound (apparently for each limb). That
concludes the first stage, the formation of the golem's body. In the second
stage you must combine each letter of the alphabet with each letter from the
Tetragrammaton (YHVH) and pronounce each of the resulting letter pairs
with every possible vowel sound. In this case the use of the Tetragrammaton,
even though it is permutated, is the "activation word".
iv. Ab. vi. 5; Baraita; B. B. 145b; Tem. 16a; Ket. 103b;
Yer. Ter. iv. 42d.
v. A strong, coarse fabric with a linen or cotton warp and
a woolen weft.
vi. Additionally, early writers, like Maimonides, state that the
prohibition was a case of the general law (Leviticus 20:23) against imitating Canaanite customs. Maimonides
wrote that: "the heathen
priests adorned themselves
with garments containing
vegetable and animal materials, while they held in their hand a seal of
mineral.
vii. Sometimes referred to as Yoshu (Jesus). According to Ex
12:6, the paschal sacrifice had to be slaughtered in the afternoon, which
aligns perfectly with the time for the paschal sacrifice laid out in the
Mishnah, from the sixth to the ninth hours of the day. This was also the period
when Jesus was reportedly crucified: “Now from the sixth hour there was
darkness over all the land until the ninth hour” (Matt 27:45).
viii. Julian Brolaski Talamantez
ix. Marc-Alain
Ouaknin, “The Letter E,” The Secrets of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing.
New York: Abbeville Press, 1999.
x. Ouaknin,
94.
xi. Moshe Idel, “On the language of ecstatic experiences in Jewish mysticism.” in Religionen - Die Religiöse Erfahrung (Religions - The Religious Experience , eds. Riedl, M. & Schabert, T., Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 200, pp. 43-84
xii. Jacques
Derrida, Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago
Press, 1981.
xiii. Paleolinguist
and textile historian Elizabeth Barber has suggested that, in the Odyssey,
Penelope’s weaving by day and unweaving by night is writing and unwriting a
story. She observes that, had Penelope been making a garment or bedding, the
improbability of the task lasting seven years would have tipped off her suitors
to her ruse; however, if she’d been weaving a tapestry depicting, say, her
military superstar father’s triumphant return after a significant battle,
tapestry being the way the alphabetically illiterate could “read the news” of
history and fable, it was entirely likely that such an ambitious project would
take the seven years she managed to stave them off, stalling for Odysseus’s
return.
MARIA DAMON BIO
Maria Damon is Professor of Writing
and Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the Pratt Institute of Art.
She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American
Vanguard Poetry; Post-literary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to
Micropoetries as well as two chapbooks of cross-stitch visual poems, meshwards
and XXX; co-author, with mIEKAL aND, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, and Alan
Sondheim, of several books of poetry; and co-editor, with Ira Livingston, of Poetry
and Cultural Studies: A Reader.
ADEENA KARASICK
BIO
Adeena
Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist
and media artist and the author of nine books of poetry and poetics. Her
Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described
as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive
word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning
and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity
of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's
signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin). Most recently is Checking In
Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press,
Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera. She teaches Literature
and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt
Institute, and Poetry and Poetics for Brandeis University; Poetry Editor for
Explorations in Media Ecology, 2019, Associate International Editor of New
Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for
her contributions to feminist thinking. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” has been
established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
