Surfactant Program

This is an excerpted transcript from the third episode of Are.na Radio, an audio experiment with Montez Press Radio where people share their Are.na channels, describe what’s been collected, and reveal the threads of thought therein.

Hey, this is rosemary ✿. 

Today I want to read to you from a channel called “surfactant program.” My hope is to trace a collage that weaves its threads into itself — threads about listening, about the way I relate to my loom, and about what spiders can teach us about thinking. To get into that headspace, I’ll start with Pauline Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening, as expressed in her 1998 score “Ear Piece.”

I believe the acoustics that concerned Oliveros are expansive enough to encompass other sensory organs, not just the ears. When I weave, I deep listen through my limbs. Vibrations from the loom travel along the treadles that I press my feet against, into my body. This is one way I receive information about how the weaving is going and how I need to adjust forces like rhythm, tension, and balance as I pass a shuttle back and forth across the warp. It’s also how I learn what the loom itself is feeling. Because of course it feels: this is a wise machine, older than anyone I know, with a wealth of experience. In this life-sized volume, creative energies condense, meet for a dance and then zoom away. And if you know what to listen for, they have plenty to say. In his interviews with northern Indian weavers, sociologist Deepak Mehta often heard the saying “the clapping of the shuttle is the speaking of the word.”

This channel started around the time I was thrust into figuring out how to be a woman at the same time as I was learning how to be a weaver. My preoccupation was surfaces: reflective planes that contain and define a body, why it felt like I was missing them, and how to make new ones whole cloth. Surfaces don’t have to be superficial in a dismissive sense; they are boundaries, they connect us to ourselves. And it can be disorienting to be without them.

Take this passage from Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy: 

She now came and stood beside me and placed one arm around my shoulders, and with the other she held on to my two hands; she drew me close to her. She must have known that I was about to break apart, and what she was doing was holding me together in one piece, like the series of tin bands that hold a box of goods together if it is being sent far overseas.

We can dwell on the surface for as long as we want, but one of the directions we can go from there is inside. The inside of a loom, the inside of a spider’s mind, or the inside of a performance memory embodied in cloth. (It may turn out we’re going not inside the thing it covers, but inside the surface itself.) This is where I want to circle back to deep listening.

The loom and I are in dialogue through a physical language, so closely that I know us as a single unified mind while we’re working, where neither partner has more inherent agency or even sentience than the other. Poet Bernadette Mayer speaks to being enmeshed across the system of another weaver in her short poem “I Am Proactive Ephemeral Epiphytic Residue:”

In a 2017 journal article called “Extended Spider Cognition,” H.F. Japyassú and K.N. Laland consider how orb-weaver spiders meld their minds with their webs. One example is also about listening: spiders hear what’s going on in their web through their legs, and they can ask the web to filter sounds. By altering the geometry of the threads and how tightly they hold them, they can attune the web to the vibrations of specific bugs.

The premise is that the cognitive process (in this case, acoustic processing) cannot be pinned down in one place or the other — the spider or the web, the weaver or the loom. They’re doing something together that neither can do alone. I picture this communal emergent ability as a glowing orb in the space between us, its light warming our faces. It’s transient and elusive because it is live and participatory. In the short years that I’ve been weaving, I notice more and more of my thinking fitting into this entangled kind of mode. My thoughts appear like patterned webs in my mind, all at once. This fibrous thought structure is hard to translate into the words or images that I usually communicate through; it requires parallel and perpendicular lines interacting simultaneously. Friction across dozens of interlacements produces surface. I have a nickname for it, in solidarity with my eight-legged colleagues: arachnid consciousness.

We can value experience non-linguistically anywhere. I don’t know the context for this block, but I like the way that filmmaker Barbara Hammer explains some state as “difficult to explicate because we are using words for an emotional event that transcends the literal, the linear, this format of speaking and writing. The impulse to form surges gently from the entirety. Not like a flash and over. A continual gentle surge to be let out, to give form.”

I am learning to appreciate the meshy structure. It is, after all, the medium in which the loom and I speak to one another. And it’s whispered everywhere, by the cloth that surrounds us, if we just stop to listen. For as long as there have been weavers — longer than we humans have had writing — we have been embedding memories in cloth: like our feelings that day, the bonds of our families, and the ethics of our communities, alongside the self-documenting technical procedures of how we are making that cloth.

Artist-technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin, on a question of how to pass down technological knowledge to a young person, locates longevity in interlacement: 

Maybe I put it in the designs of the clothing she wears; I weave it into the baskets that she’s born in. I’m going to essentially decentralize this to the point where a piece of this thread is in everything she touches.

I am grateful to Daniela Bologna for interpreting this idea from a different angle.

I’ll close with writer Édouard Glissant’s suggestion of a densely fibral thought pattern against Caribbean colonial hierarchy: 

Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.

I am moved by the gravity of Glissant’s call to feel the texture of the web, not as something to be decoded, but as its own irreducible expression. As a surface that’s deep, if you listen. As, simply and entangledly, a web.