SPECULATIVE TEXTILE
Los Angeles, August 2022
In the Caleb Crain novel Overthrow, a man is not surprised to learn that his friend’s dissertation analyzes the metaphysics of kingship in early modern English poetry—after all, he reflects, gay men are liable to attend to “the aura left behind by power instead of power itself.”
I think a lot about the genre of knowledge comprising that for which we have evidence but which we cannot observe first-hand: the creation of the moon, black holes, dinosaurs, quarks. The ancient, the immense, the extinct, the infinitesimally small. Robustly real and never to be found—like the dead. Except by aura, specter, fact—and voice.
So these garments give voice, I suppose or hope, to a force—call it spirit, call it faggotry, call it grief. Call it the End-Holocene Extinction Event.
I find myself returning repeatedly to two historical inflection points. One is the turn of the 17th century, when William Lee of Calverton was lugging his stocking frames around England seeking royal imprimatur to mechanize knitting, when the colonization of the Americas and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that enabled it were gaining monstrous momentum, when the seedlings of total capital were breaching and the poetry vaulting that eruption described it: “Commodity, the bias of the world,” says Philip the Bastard in Shakespeare’s King John, “[t]hat daily break-vow, he that wins of all, [...] [t]his bawd, this broker, this all-changing word.” The other is the turn of the 20th century, when the industrialization of textile, and everything else after, was complete after a fashion, but no synthetic (petroleum-based) "bers had yet been invented. Ready-to-wear absent plastic: the sans-spandex sportswear of the first modern Olympics in Athens, 1896; the men at work in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy; the paintings of Thomas Eakins and what his scullers wore.
My dad died at the very beginning of this project, just before the pandemic shutdown of the University of California, Riverside, where I was studying for my MFA in creative writing. For many months I worked to give myself sufficient mourning costume—what to wear to feel and be known. During this time I read Henry Staten’s Eros in Mourning (well I read its introduction) and learned that, for Plato and his clique, to gain maturity was to overcome love of transient things (like people, who die) in order to love eternal things, transcendent concepts like love, humankind, virtue itself. Staten argues that Christ, as incarnation of the transcendent (at once a man who dies and God who does not), ‘resolves’ the dichotomy of the Greeks. Faith then is to operate in the conceptual field where the transient and the eternal are not opposed. It may not be possible to know how, only that, this could be. Staten takes Jesus’s resurrection and promise of eternal life to refer not to any beyond but to “this present life transformed by vision.” I have found these conceptualizations—whether they are quite secularizations seems an open question to me, though at present I take them to be—to be useful in these years of mourning, years that have made art the effort to transform life by vision.
I have dreamed often of my father since he died. In dreams the dead speak and you listen. Sometimes it is enough to hold a mask in your hands. I am working on a novel whose “time of narration” is the week when the narrator’s father has died but has not yet been cremated—the week on ice. All these works I make may come from the week on ice. My foremost hope is that they energize thought.
Words and all knitwear by Patrick Carroll
Photography by Mateus Porto
Production by Jonathan Huguet