On Raveling and Unraveling, and not Interchanging
This is the second time Iâve taken this effing hat apart, unraveling hoursâ worth of work and starting again from almost the very beginning. Iâm not a bad knitter, but when things get complicated or a new-to-me technique is required, my tendency to rush ahead and just figure it out as I go along sometimes turns into a mess, and I wind up right back where I started.
Part of the reason I havenât given it up by now, declared it not worth the time and frustration, is because this current bane of my crafting existence is a gift for my nephewâand thatâs to be followed up by an insanely creative bag for his sister, an accessory that forced me over the past couple of weeks to learn with no little degree of bafflement how to crochet. These are the only gifts Iâll be giving anyone for Christmas; probably more than twenty years ago now, my sister and I begged our parents to stop giving us presents and just let us hang out together and bake things and make the rounds of extended family dinners and let that be that. At the time, it wasnât a protest against what Iâve begun calling consumerist holy week: the gluttony that starts off at Thanksgiving and bears down through at least five more days of themed outpouring of funds and purchases that not only lands a disturbing chunk of US Americans in debt, but also reinforces the conviction that buying and receiving shiny new things is the only valid proof of love or affection. And then the whole rigamarole sends another bunch of people into the doldrums, not having received the dream gift they so hoped for and feeling hurt and misunderstood and unloved because no one cared enough to discern or take into account their true inner desires⌠Our protest at that point didnât carry all that weight, but it was a plea for our immediate family to just enjoy some time off without all the idiotic pressure that came with the holidays.1
So I donât give Christmas gifts, except for the two aforementioned kids, who arenât old enough to appreciate one more of their weird auntâs losing battles. And my compromise is usually making them something; the hit of recent years has been an embroidered pair of Chuck Taylors with a top-hatted frog looking appropriately high while lodged atop a toadstool, a project that actually resulted in blood being dripped somewhere on the canvas when I stabbed my thumb with a giant needle. You could say, literally in that last case, itâs a pain; why donât I just buy something and be done with it, especially when the kidsâd be just as happy, if not more so, getting something off their Amazon wishlists?
Iâve been thinking about this question over the last few days, in the wake of a friendâs recent conversation with a university administrator. The latter had cheerfully advocated firing entire departmentsâ worth of faculty and replacing them with newbie graduates at a twenty percent salary reduction. When met with protest, the administrator demanded my friend tell him exactly why he thought no one else could do his job. Youâre replaceable, the administrator said. Interchangeable. Everyone is.
So much to object to; where to start? Yes, budgeting is important, and in a society whose ultimate source of value is profit, we canât just shell out and employ everyone with a neat specialty. But in addition to the administrator reflecting our countryâs devaluation of education in general (where education is whatever most cheaply and efficiently hands over the practical skills needed to get a job that pays well), his plan is a pretty sad indication of where human or individual value lies at all. What makes you a human being worthy of attention, care, interest, supportâof life at all?
In this instance, what is it about a teacher that doesnât fit into the widget model of judgment? Iâll hold up one of the most memorable examples from my own long educational history: a Hebrew Bible professor who somehow brought to vivid life a history and literature and context that had seemed up until that point to convey to my mind nothing but dustâbrown dirt swirling in a vast desert while one tribe or people killed another and made maudlin speeches about it after reading off long genealogical lists and repeating constant reminders of what Yahweh had done for them centuries before that. Having been hustled off to church every Sunday of my childhood and adolescence, the material was lodged in my head thanks to week after week of hearing a pastor read it with as much enthusiasm as could be mustered after decades of the same routine. In class, though? Here was a guy who loved this stuff, loved giving all the sides of the regionsâ stories and bringing in players weâd never heard of and similar-sounding myths thatâd been shoved aside by the victors who wrote the texts, handing out clear explanations of changing meanings and patterns and linguistic conventions, encouraging and hearing out every last one of our questions.
Well thatâs all well and good, the administrator might counter, but what difference has it made? How are you using that? Youâre not a religious adherent and donât sit around reading ancient scriptures or heroesâ tales. What job or promotion or earned fee will that ever get you, and why should we be paying someone at all to be teaching such irrelevant stuff, when he can go and enthuse about it with seminarians or a MeetUp group?
Thanks to his particularâhis own uniqueâapproach to teaching, that professor helped me make sense of what had shaped me; of what the community Iâd grown up in believed and why, of what it meant that they in some ways had so little understanding of it all. It wasnât anything I could put on a resume, only an example that led me, and not only me, into greater maturity. In that graduate course were a number of divinity students, whom you could see trying to figure out with each new bit of information how to handle it all. If what I was told was correct, that semester, 60% of the large universityâs counseling clients were from the divinity school; they were wrestling with things too big to figure out on their own, or with their usual church resources. The professor was a religious historianânot a religious adherentâand hereâs where that becomes important, in the face of those freaking out new seminarians and the poverty of the widget model of education. He didnât share those studentsâ beliefs; in his own life, he had no use for what his subject said about the Lord or his or the worldâs relationship to him. But he never, ever, dismissed these believersâ concerns as silly or lamentable; he was never unwilling to listen and talk to people undergoing real identity crises about what this all meant for their faith, and thus how they lived their lives. That professorâs mission was not to make good atheists out of his students, but to give them a good understanding of the world and the writings out of which their beliefs had developed.
Put that class in the hands of a newly minuted PhD, on the other hand, eager to prove their greater knowledge and gravity by poo-poohing what the ignorant masses find important, and youâre going to generate a lot of resentment, very little learning, and firmly drawn lines in a culture war that grows increasingly wearisome. Being willing, on the other hand, to listen, knowing that even if you donât share the same convictions as the person whoâs sought you out, they hold those convictions as being fundamental to who they are and how they navigate the worldâbeing willing to make it apparent that this student is worth the time to take seriouslyâis something entirely different. The tenured scholar whoâs learned over years how to be a compassionate mentor, even to people not that interested in his pet area, is not interchangeable with a defensive twenty-something so desperate for a scarce job that theyâll accept the post for near-poverty wages and be as parsimonious with class time and office hours as a health insurance company-approved doctor is with a patient visit.
The difference that class and its instructor have made and continue to make for me, in other words, is not the greater appreciation of the professorâs subject matterâas a rule, I donât spend even leisure time thinking about or reading literature on or of the ancient Near Eastâbut the example he provided of how to treat people, especially when you have all the power and knowledge, and those other people pretty much have none. The profit model of education would say you hand over the useful facts, and those who get it get it and deserve what they can get with it; those who canât learn it quickly, or at all, should seek upskilling or learn to code or whatever. As long as itâs cheap and efficient, the important thing is getting the skills; you donât need more than the skills, anyway, so why pay extra for unnecessaries?
Anyone who hasnât been sealed off in a cave for the last twenty years or so, though, should be able to tell how evident it is that more than âhardâ skills are necessary to keeping a society together, much less functioning and healthy. Whether running a tech company or a country, whether making decisions about government policy or how to interact with neighbors whose yard signs make clear you have different assumptions about how the world should work, something intangible and informal, something other than the ability to prompt ChatGPT or design an app or move packages in an Amazon warehouse is essential to interacting as a human being with other human beings. We are not cogs, and unless we get that through our collective head, the society weâre supposed to be a part of isnât going to get any closer to a fair or desirable or even more civil one.
Part of why I keep messing with the knitting has to do with the time the person who taught me how to do it took with me. A fellow student in that Hebrew Bible class, weâd sit around in the summers where there was nothing to do and no money to do it with, knitting and talking and listening to music. My friend was a master of the craft, and it was only thanks to her enthusiasm and suggestion I give it a shot that I learned at all. Anyone couldâve shown me how to knit; these days, I can just watch videos on my ownâbut my friend, as instructor or otherwise, was irreplaceable.
Without her model of patience and gusto, without having watched her unravel without resentment or irritation a whole sleeve or shawl sheâd just spent the afternoon on, whether to correct a mistake, or just to find out how a pattern was supposed to be worked, I probably never would even have finished the first scarf I started under her tutelage. Had I wanted a scarf, I wouldâve gone out and bought one, problem solved. And without being guided into what is essentially a practice of patience and acceptance of the rollercoaster of mastery and mistake-laden backtracking involved in bringing to reality something entirely your ownâhonestly, I donât want to think about it. It sounds overblown to say that knitting has saved me from holding onto frustrations that might otherwise have me being treated for hypertensionâbut I wonât deny the value of being in the middle of any frustrating process (including writing and thinking, and including writing and thinking about this very essay), realizing I can retrace my steps and start over and not only not have to get worked up about it, but also start anew with better capabilities or better knowledge. Itâs possible I could have learned all those warm fuzzy benefits of wielding the needles had my instructor been less giving or had I been watching videos. But from the get-go I was mentored into taking the time to learn, to get something right, to enjoy the process and to confront setbacks with good cheer and grace and even laughter at the whole messâinto experiencing an activity as being great just because, even if nothing complete or good or useful came of it.
So I keep messing with it, but do I really think my young family members, who are unaware of all this starting over and starting over again, will really care? Probably not, and thatâs just fine. But I sure know that my niece had a hell of a good time wielding her Converse with the bloodstained frog on them. No one else in school could offer up a new, clean replacement for them, and I donât think she wouldâve accepted had they offered. They wouldnât have been the same, and she knew it.
1. Some of that pressure was undoubtedly intended to be removed from our mother, whose approach to gift giving involves the declaration, and I quote, that âif they donât like it, they can lump it.â Iâm not sure how much of the seeming hostility is genuine, and how much is meant to mask her fears that sheâs bought something the recipient wonât like, and will hence reflect badly upon her.âŠ