2.12.08

Sometime in the late 17th century, Irish writer Jonathon Swift penned the phrase “You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.” He should have known better. His own livelihood was afforded by his ingenuity and effort, creating great works from simply arranging words on paper. Words can be cheap, and ugly too, and it takes more than the raw materials to make them into something worthy of art. Of course the meaning of his infamous phrase is clear; you can’t make something of beauty or value from something ugly or inferior. What it fails to account for is the ingenuity and alchemy of the human touch, which can bring forth beauty and usefulness from the plainest and ugliest of materials. While I understand his logic, I can’t accept it. I have an easier time subscribing to the idea of making something from nothing.

When I consider Swift’s quote, I’m thinking “Did he know where silk comes from anyway?”  Sure, it’s one of the costliest fabrics around, but it also has some very humble beginnings. Worms. It comes from the glandular secretions of worms. I would call that making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, wouldn’t you?

Several years ago while at a hand-knitting trade show in Columbus I met two of my long time customers who owned a successful yarn store in Verona, Wisconsin. I had always mused at why they named their shop “The Sow’s Ear” and so I asked them. One of them rattled off Swift’s quote and then explained, “Have you ever seen a sheep after a year of weather? A woman can take the dirty, oily fleece, scour it until it is pure white, comb it until it is soft and fine, dye it into any colour she can imagine, spin it into a silken thread and weave or knit it into a thing of useful beauty.” Made sense to me.

Believe or not people actually have made silk-like purses out of sow’s ears. The first successful attempt was back in the early 1920’s by a Massachusetts industrialist. From a meatpacker, he obtained a glue-like substance that had been extracted from the gristle and skin of sow’s ears.  He had an amount of “glue” equivalent to one sow’s ear filtered and forced through a spinneret into a mixture of formaldehyde and acetone⎯also some very nasty and hardly elegant materials. The glue emerged from the machine as sixteen fine, colorless streams that hardened and then combined to form a single composite fiber. It was then soaked in dye-saturated glycerin. He wove the resulting thread into cloth on a handloom and had it sewn into an elegant purse similar to one carried by royalty in the Middle Ages. How about that for a little bit of alchemy? So sure, that seems pretty disgusting, but what makes real silk any different?

My son Kris and I used to travel to Tennessee so he could study with bass player Victor Wooten of the famed Blue Grass quartet “Bela Fleck and the Flecktones”. Victor became a mentor to my son over the years and often we would sit outside around the fire and talk about music and nature and life and how they were all connected. One night my son asked Vic if he could play his most famous bass, a handmade Fodera that not many people in the world could afford. Somehow my son thought that by playing this bass it would make him sound more like his hero. Vic understood that this was what he was really asking for, so he gave it to him. Kris played it, and while it surely felt magic to play his hero’s instrument, he did not sound much different than he normally did. He had been talking about how he wished he could afford to buy a bass like the one Victor played and that his really sounded terrible in comparison. Then Victor did a very wise thing. He asked to play Kris’s bass---a two hundred dollar piece of plywood with the most basic electronics and strings. What we heard was incredible---“Amazing Grace” in full harmonics that sounded as close to a three piece ensemble as one man and two hands could get.  He made that humble guitar sound as good as that handmade, custom Fodera. And then he passed it back and said “Nice bass. Get to know it. Make it work for you. It’s not the arrow, Kris, it’s the Indian.” 

That bit of wisdom stuck with my son and several years later when he was in need of a fretless bass he decided that instead of spending a few thousand dollars on the one he was drooling over at his favourite guitar store in Rochester, he would take that starter instrument and transform it into something he could use. He still plays it today and it sounds mighty fine when manipulated by his now well-practiced fingers.

I do believe there is some truth to Swift’s statement. There is coal and then there are diamonds. Pearls and plastic. And how about Bud Light and a well-crafted microbrew? Would you rather make a beautiful meal out of canned and overly processed inferior foods, or with fresh vegetables, grains and wild game? Would you rather sleep on fine cotton or polyester? But if you take any one of those things back to its origins they all come from the raw materials of the earth. Have you ever seen a diamond in the rough? It’s the human touch that makes the difference.

Comments

[darlene]

my mind is swirling but my smile is saying yes and i think about how it applies to photography and the differing cameras and how it really is the human touch that can create beauty with the crappiest of cameras ... this was wonderful to read, thank you ... xo

[Skippy's Mom]

wonderful observations from my own special "diamond in the rough"....a beautiful soul brought to its outer beauty by those who love her so much......

[PixieDust]

Exactly, Querida!

Look at me!

;-)

hahahaha!

Seriously, this is a beautiful observation, and something I find extremely comforting...

(((HUGS))),
Love,
Me

[caroline]

Excellent! I love this, so true. I love following your writing, it's beautiful. xoxo