Of Printer’s Devils and Needlework

Posted on July 15, 2002 in Adolescence Ancestors

Every weekend, I give my creative writing a rest — which means that on Mondays I must push start my literary engine. The first stuff I wrote this morning felt like a rant and it was! In the world of the computer, it’s easy to become like an old-fashioned printer’s case, a neat order on the face of it but a jumble of stubby pieces of lead once you start checking out the boxes.

Many years ago, in high school, I learned the real craft of printing, when you pulled the individual letters out of the box or made whole lines fresh from hot lead on a Linotype machine. I loved how I could line up the letters so that they started to mean something beyond their names and the sounds I made to myself when I saw them. As I write this, I’ve got such a case — a phantom one — set out before me and bores me to see all the sounds just piled there, the fragments of sentences not coming together in any matter to please me. I just stare into that space between me and something I pick out there that is between things. The moment comes, at last, when tin lithography plates replace the linotype pressings. Then comes another jump when the letters blink on a kind of mental video screen. Beyond that is a whole new technology, beyond mere ink and luminescences, the stuff that is really frustrating to write about because the senses just putter up to it and fail.

I fancy it is similar to the joy and the sorrow that my grandmother felt as she did needlework. The thread follows the piercing shard into the cloth and out the other side. Each stitch gets a new grip on the cotton.

My grandmother was a talented artist with the needle and thread. She knew how to create eye-deceiving dappling that made her works seem alive. Unlike my mother who needs to buy pre-printed patterns, Grandma Stella started with a blank cloth and sewed until there was a picture. I wonder how many pieces of cloth she threw away because she failed? On my wall, I have one of the pieces that succeeded — a rainbow parrot on black cloth. I sometimes imagine it croaking its encouragement to me from its jungle.