FAKE PURLS
These days I’m wearing plastic. That’s how I’m rolling at the moment. I know; you’re quick-as-a flash seeing me up and down the shifting hummocks of a shake-shake. But no. I don’t mean those noir spray-ons.
I’m meaning the kind of thing that arrived (oof) from Amazon yesterday, that scared the nightlights out of Rose when it came sailing over the gate at 9 o’clock; and the bejeezus out of me when I couldn’t tell which was clothes and which was package.
It’s true I was a little suspicious of the ‘Luxe oversized hooded cardigan.’ A) because it cost roughly five bucks before the bus ride from China. And B) because one of the reviewers said this strange thing: “It does a good job of looking knitted.”
It actually doesn’t. Its knit-one-purl-one stitch is completely and utterly bogus, spun — most likely — by a 3-D printer. It looks nothing whatsoever like the scarf I knitted endlessly, nonstop, without pause through my childhood; and which eventually became long enough, when I finally cast off, to strangle many times around, my grandmother’s house in Surrey, and the two of us within it.
Thinking now, and a bit of a jump, that house was also passing off as something it wasn’t. But, unlike my stupid plastic sweater, pulled the wool over in a far slicker way. What I mean is the house was masquerading as something it wasn’t – yes, its bones were Victorian, but it pretended, after my grandfather had had his way with it, to be Georgian.
That’s because he was an architect. When it came to a house, he could have it exactly as he wanted. And he didn’t want the curlicued dollhouse-ishness of the Victorian era. But rather the cool symmetry of an earlier epoch. He took his home, so to speak, back in time. Even though it had never been there to begin with.
My sweater is struggling with some of the same issues; it wants what is lost. Or rather, what never was. It wants hands that stitched, needles which clacked to the snap and crackle of flame in a fireplace. It wants me to feel a lamby softness as I push in my arms and wrap it snugly around. It wants to be what it will never be: soft and knitted and not off a shipping container from somewhere far, far away.
I feel sorry for it. My sweater is a wannabe. It doesn’t want what is; what it is. And apparently (and consequently), I don’t want it either.
Unless, I choose to see it differently, i.e. as a bona fide product of its time, just as a mile-long scarf hanging off a couple of wooden needles in a house not quite telling the truth, was a bona fide product of its.
So yes, my little, oversized, plastic, hooded cardi from who knows where is, really and truly, one in a million.
AB - 17.10.23