an alphabetical list of words relating to a specific subject, text, or dialect, with explanations; a brief dictionary.
The manner of commencing the work.
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[Anglo Saxon Cnittan, threads woven by the hand. See Finger Knitting.]
The first and chief stitch in Knitting, and sometimes called Plain Knitting. It is executed by means of long needles or pins, formed of bone, steel, or wood; one thread only is worked, which is formed into loops, and passed from one pin to another.
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Also known as Back, Reversed, Ribbed, Seam, and Turned. It is the stitch next in importance to Knit, and produces the ribs or knots in the front of the work where they are required, or, when worked as the back row, gives the appearance of Round Knitting to a straight piece of work.
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When changing Knitting to Purling, the thread that is at the back of the work for Knitting is passed between the stitches to bring it to the front for Purling. This movement of the thread is generally understood, but not expressed, although the term is sometimes used in old books.
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When changing Purling to Knitting, pass the thread which is at the front of the work for Purling to the back.
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Stitches are Dropped in Knitting for the purpose of making open spaces, or when Decreasing; but no stitch should be Dropped unless it has been caught, and will not unravel the work.
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Petition local authorities for.
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These days I have been struggling, trying to press back those overwhelming organs of the past. Rushing back and forth, the resistance, a line made of fierce. Or fog to the sting of grief. Each day. I cannot say exactly what grips but something savage is at work. Each hour. As I try to sure up the sides of this grieving well with additional staves of fresh timber, the trauma continues to leak here and here, do you see where I am pointing? Each time I return to the site of that holding, a new hole seems to perforate the skin. Just big enough for the point of a pencil. To mark for eternity, what is open. What remains. Think of something really good she says. Think of a place that makes you feel safe. The directive is more complicated than it seems. Before me now, that great stand of ancient yews in Borrowdale. Arms of twisted fibre, reaching up and around that deep green valley. Me, feet in liverwort, thick with envy for the still.
When Knitting with four or five pins, each time the stitches have been once knitted.
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Similar to a Round (which see).
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wu wei, the art of not-doing, action through non-action. An alignment with the natural world that resists force and coercion through gentleness. A tender existence. Wu wei, a practice that may be guided by observance of the paradox of water. A substance fluid, soft, and yielding. A flow that incises gorges through mountains. See: the ethics of sitting with forgetfulness.
“In practice, it is impossible to measure the extent to which mycelium perfuses the Earth’s structures, systems and inhabitants - its weave is too tight . Mycelium is a way of life that challenges our animal imaginations.”
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Floofiness refers to a yarn’s “halo area, where ephemeral fuzzy fibers stick out,” Dr. Matsumoto said, and it changes the way two pieces of yarn interact with each other, their friction and energy exchange. “I’d love to write a paper using the word ‘floofy’ as a technical term.”
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The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years.
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I just saw what you wrote on the shape of missings and I wanted to thank you for adding that small s to the end of of this already-too-a-full thing. I wanted to say, this thing that is both plural and dissolving, I feel full of it too. I keep going back to try and grip onto little pieces of something solid. But I can’t even tell in which direction I’m reaching. Those finite losses you mention, they hang around, make-felt what was always and already feeling, no? The past. Swells like a belly stuffed with popping corn. And the mouth, poor mouth. Tries day after day to hold it back from spilling.
New and accumulating deficits for things I’m unsure now if I ever had. It’s hard to comprehend a human deficit. Did I ever own them? Is there a stockpile of finite losses that are whittled away over a lifetime? Is someone keeping score. Do we get a quota?
You bring a sadness in all the missings, but you are not forgotten. A falling star with a long tail.
The good thing about moss stitch is that it’s reversible. There is no right or wrong side.
1,500 ammonites drifted down to the same place over 100,000 years. How on Earth can this be? Every ammonite was a living being. But at the Ammonite Wall, how to relate to them as so much life, and not just a long moment of mass death? An extended extinction event. My mother was one living being, now she has died. In that sense, she is extinct, as there can never be anyone else who is just exactly her. Every death is an extinction, and so every life is momentous.
I broke down on the street sobbing last night when I came back, as my glasses fell off when I took my mask off after getting off the train - and I didn’t notice. Once home a little later - I did and thought - fuck where are my glasses - hunted through the house and realised they must have fallen off when I took the mask off, but it was so cold and stormy and almost a gale so I didn’t notice. So, I went out into the storm and traced my steps, the light on my phone a weak hand held lighthouse. And in the end I did find them - down by the station - almost intact - the very end of one arm broke off… you can’t see that as it is hidden behind my ear - I still can wear them, but will need to fix somehow as it’s sharp. And why was I sobbing you might ask. I began sobbing once I found them. A secret unspeakable truth. At 11:45 at night on September 12th, 2020 I had the glasses next to me on the floor while I was doing my nightly stretches - when I got the message from Samara that we needed to speak ASAP. I knew then in that instant my mother had begun to die - and as I sat up - I put my hand down wrong and landed on the glasses - where the arm hinge bent slightly - wearable but a little off balance. And I have worn them that way ever since - somehow like a clock that stopped at the moment she began to leave me. And I fucking lost it thinking I had lost the glasses, but hadn’t and had found them, but never with her again. It is such a deep and complex animal, this grief, this loss, the dementia, all of it.
I lost another friend yesterday
Repeat the row.
I have been practicing waiting as your capacity to bend life/time, touches. Even when we prepare for you, in big or small ways we are still thrown by your realness. Caught in your shroud you loop us into backwards and forwards, distorting time, holding our disbelief.
There are veterans who seem better prepared for you—see you coming and can harden the ground and core. Who can swallow better than others or have worn a path—or maybe not? Is it possible to become immune?
Cast off
‘hush, be quiet. We’re talking about soft little things.’
“a call for tender acts of individual and collective imagination through which new axes of caring, connection, and resilience might be forged”.
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A conglomerate is a sedimentary rock composed of many different kinds of rocks naturally bound together. A family, just like a rock, can be composed of many parts.
To work as shown in Fig. 514: Put the two pins containing the work together, the one holding the longer piece at the back. Take a spare pin and put it through the first stitch upon the front pin, and the first stitch upon the back, and KNIT the two together; continue to Knit the stitches together in this manner until all stitches are absorbed.
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as soon as there is sufficient accumulation
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better allow it to accumulate for the present
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the ability to feel through others.
refers not really to surface or even depth so much as to an intimately violent, pragmatic, medium, inner level (at first more phenomenological than conceptual/ metaphysical) of the stuff-ness of material structure… it complicates the internal… Food and sex may be the common hedonistic domains of this quality, for even more than in friction, slipperiness, nappiness, or fuzziness, this texture resides in properties of crunchiness, chewiness, brittleness, elasticity, bounciness, sponginess, hardness, softness, consistency, striatedness, sogginess, stiffness, or porousness. In Heisenberg’s model of vision, the observer’s gaze transforms the object one would like to know, because this look implies the deflection of light off of the object. Analogously, for TEXXTURE, the Heisenberg principle, almost identical to the problem of feedback in observation, becomes even more literally and epistemologically violent. For touch and physical pressure transform the materials one would like to know, assess, love.
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held in common by two or more parties. Reciprocal. A financial organisation that is owned by its members and dividing some or all of its profits between them. A type of financial fund that pools money from many people to invest in stocks, bonds or other assets. Each investor in the fund owns shares which represent a part of these holdings.
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if mutually agreeable
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articulated by Donna Haraway as ‘the recent now’. From the Greek Kainos, Haraway speaks the suffix –cene as a ‘thick, ongoing now. The now that collects up inheritances, that makes ongoing possible. The Kainos of times that are not reducible to an instantaneous present that is always disappearing into the past.’ 1
In a recent Yale University address, Haraway explains this proposition as invitation, ‘We can live in a thick present’, she argues, ‘not an instantaneous present, a thick now where taking care of each other, human and non-human, for partial healing and for flourishing, remain at stake.’ 2 . I am thinking of what it takes to reach backwards, arms lunging, in order to make steady this tumbling ground of the present.
More on the thick present in Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. Experimental Futures. (2016). Durham. Duke University Press.
in it’s simplest sense, is to write under something, especially under something written; to subscribe. An underwriter agrees to pay for or finance an undertaking by adding one’s name to a document. A ledger. We are thinking about a framework we might come to call an Underwriting Exchange. We are talking about the practice of readers underwriting artists by guaranteeing payment in advance for a process, service, object, idea, relationship or language. More than crowdfunding, underwriting (embracing speculative risk) becomes the fluctuating value itself—the economy of investment exchange. A constantly fluctuating value driven by language, proximity and the markets. In equal measure.
to become attentive to our minerality is, according to Kathryn Yusoff, to appreciate that we are in extremely close contact (entwined, even) with matters and energies that form the nonhuman dimensions of collective human subjectivity. 1
a space waiting to be made full; of potential, for receding into. An arm off of a larger body. A temporary withdrawal or cessation from the usual labour or activity; pauses, intervals and halts. To resist exploitation, even momentarily.
SIFT, verb transitive. 1. To separate by a sieve, as the fine part of a substance from the coarse; as, to sift meal; to sift powder; to sift sand or lime. 2. To separate; to part. 3. To examine minutely or critically; to scrutinize. Let the principles of the party be thoroughly sifted. We have sifted your objections.
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There are several ways of Decreasing, and the methods are also known as Narrowing, or Taking in; but when the word Decrease is used in the instructions without other explanations, it is understood to mean KNIT two stitches together. To Decrease see Fig. 507.
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FRAG’MENT, noun [Latin fragmentum, from frango, to break.]
from err – to wander. Not even or regular in pattern of movement. Intervals of instability. Acting, moving, or changing in ways that are not expected or usual. To stray. Prone to unexpected change. Fluid, mutable wanderings. The transposition of material. Of a lichen; having no attachment to the surface on which it grows. As sensation. Sometimes queering. Eccentric, queer. Queering the landscape
REFLEC’TION, noun [from reflect.]
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Quiescence comes from the Latin ‘quiescere’, to rest or become quiet, a temporary cessation of activity, it is also the period in which a glacier is slow-moving or stagnant.
Did I miss something? I often ask myself what is the connection between hearing and listening? Some years ago I started to lose my hearing. Quietly, silently and indiscernibly to me, it was receding. I slowly entered a state of what I think of as ‘quietitude’, placed somewhere between solitude and quietness. This state softly enveloped me, where background noise became muted, conversations became distant and confusing and, without even realising, the sounds of birds, wind, traffic and waves stopped registering. Yet despite these changes, I was still listening – listening and hearing the deafening roar of silence, or the loud ringing of my ears.
used in finance and commerce to mean able to be substituted for something of equal value or utility.
Originates from Medieval Latin fungibilis, from Latin fungor (“I perform, I discharge a duty”) (English function) + -ible (“able to”). Originally a legal term, going back to Roman law: res fungibilis (“replaceable things”).
Synonyms: interchangeable, exchangeable, replaceable.
Antonym: nonfungible
to be always-already. To change continually. To be in flux. Motion. Irregular. To shift from one to an other. To oscillate wildly. To move within range of the feeder.
(n.) something irregularly or clumsily composed; it moves there steadily and continuously; pathways through matter, mo(ve)ments of value, ephemeral routes through an infrastructural ‘stack’.
FRIEND’SHIP, noun frend’ship. 1. An attachment to a person, proceeding from intimate acquaintance, and a reciprocation of kind offices, or from a favorable opinion of the amiable and respectable qualities of his mind. Friendship differs from benevolence, which is good will to mankind in general, and from that love which springs from animal appetite. True friendship is a notable and virtuous attachment, springing from a pure source, a respect for worth or amiable qualities. False friendship may subsist between bad men, as between thieves and pirates. This is a temporary attachment springing from interest, and may change in a moment to enmity and rancor. There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity. There is little friendship in the world. The first law of friendship is sincerity.
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Intimates speak in shorthand.
This is shorthand for that, and that is shorthand for us.
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow) and graphein (to write). It has also been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys (short), and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys (swift, speedy), depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal. (Wikipedia)
There are but few firm holders
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In her essay Scenography of Friendship, Svetlana Boym draws the reader into a world of ‘diasporic intimacy’—a kind of tender, non-posessive friendship of shared longing. Boym writes; ‘Tenderness is not about complete disclosure, saying what one really means, and getting closer and closer. It excludes absolute possession and fusion. Not goal-oriented, it defies symbols of fulfillment. In the words of Roland Barthes, “tenderness … is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy” and a “miraculous crystallization of presence.” In tenderness, need and desire are joined. Tenderness is always polygamous, non-exclusive. “Where you are tender, you speak your plural.”’
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Maybe all we have is proximity. I read once, or was I told, I can’t remember, that we can never really touch something, that we never make real contact. As the atoms that build our finger tips, our lips, our bodies, approach another solid, they repel what they encounter. So this sensation we call touch is actually the pressure of a micro repulsion, as tender as it may be.
‘The time of human life is a finite, perishable thing. Which is why two quantities, X and Y of perishable human time, can be brought into a relationship of fungibility only by means of a third thing, Z, that we agree upon as being imperishable, at least in comparison to human life. For thousands of years, this Z was condensed into units of precious metals, especially gold, which were treated as valuable precisely because their durability and their apparent imperishability made them appear as things that lived outside of time.’
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Malleable has two meanings. On the one hand to beat with a hammer or pound into various shapes without breaking or returning to the original shape, mostly pertaining to metals. On the other, being adaptable, yielding and amenable.
to make malleable.
The body is a wind instrument, everything a language. Quinn Latimer ends her poem, Rhine Song, with, ‘everything is / a language so open / your mouth and blow.1 ’ The strength of the waves against rock, the ringing in my ears. The shouting of my neighbour, the late night crashing on doors. The final blow breaks the little yellow glass window in the front door, a frosted fracture visible long after the event. Pale pane and the cold air that rushes in through you / pale pain.
‘When we are done with accounting for our exhaustions, we are still left with the question of how, for instance, we value a person’s life—the sum total of the value of their time on earth. The thing is, you can gauge the value of a thing only when you know what you miss when you lose it. The problem is, you would not be in a position to judge the worth of your life were you to lose it. And so, to one school of thinking, the worth of a life can only be gauged from what its absence means to those who inherit the loss.’
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Deposits of silt laid down by aeolian processes over extensive areas of the mid-latitudes during glacial and postglacial times.
‘When thinking about the qualities or, to use a more precise term, the qualia of time—the ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible sense of what happens when we are confronted with duration—be it in waiting for a bus, the arms of a lover, the walls of a prison, or by the shores of a sea—we realize that every instance of the apprehension of time’s qualia is layered on the memory of other experiences, that in some incomprehensible way, the time spent in the arms of a lover is understood not just in reference to itself, but also in contrast to the time spent waiting our turn at a ticket counter. And often, at the ticket counter or on the assembly line, waiting while the clock weighs down on us, we are recalling the intensity and the comfort of the time spent in the arms of a lover. When we trade time, which time are we trading, which layer of qualia, and how can these add up and be accounted for when our own clocks drift away from each other, from time to time?’
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These are formed in open Fancy Knitting in the following manner: For a small hole—Make a stitch with an Over in the previous row, and Drop that stitch without Knitting in the place where the open space is required. For a large hole: In the previous row pass the wool round the pin either two, three, or four times, according to the size if the hole required, and when these Overs are reached in the next row, knit the first, Purl the second, and repeat Knitting and Purling until they are all formed into stitches.
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‘It is time that has us, not we that have time…Our time began when we were born, and will end when we die. We have done nothing to earn it, so we cannot pretend that it is ours. How do we share and exchange that which is not ours? What does it mean to use words like sharing, exchange, and reciprocity in relation to something that cannot be owned?’
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A sudden, usually temporary, malfunction or fault of equipment, but also a brief irregularity in the rotation of a pulsar. The brightest pulsar in our sky is the Vela Pulsar. Visible only in the southern hemisphere, the Vela Pulsar is spinning 11 times a second and approximately every three years it momentarily speeds up, glitches. But of course the Vela Pulsar is 10,000 light years away from Earth; everything we observe has already happened a long time ago.
To Slip a stitch, proceed thus: Take a stitch off of the left pin, and slip it on to the right pin without securing it in any way. The Slipped Stitch in Fig. 522 is shown upon the right pin.
There is no now. A clock on a high mountain runs slower than one at sea level. There is no single time, no universal ‘now.’ We must think of time as a localised phenomenon. Every object in the universe has its own time running.
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I learnt about the concept of ‘terminus’ from philosopher Brian Massumi whilst I was practising-with the Senselab in Montréal. In an illuminating conversation for the Senselab’s Infelxions journal, Massumi writes: ‘The first making of the moment, the inauguration of the event, is that absolute coincidence between the past and the dawning present. Not a subject thinking or being toward the world, but the world reconstituting itself around an actively present germ of the past. There’s already, in that immeasurable instant of incipience, an activation of tendencies toward the future. The future has a kind of felt presence, an affective presence, as an attractor. Because each tendency tends toward a certain kind of outcome. It is attracted by its own end. That end point is what James calls a terminus…It is the contrasts between termini that interfere and resonate, and modulate what comes [next].’
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having a common boundary with or; Coextensive (with) in space, time or meaning. 1
‘The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift, is time. But the gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting—without forgetting (l’attente—sans oubli). It demands time, the thing, but it demands a delimited time, neither an instant nor an infinite time, but a time determined by a term, in other words, a rhythm, a cadence. The thing is not in time; it is or it has time, or rather it demands to have, to give, or to take time—and time as rhythm, a rhythm that does not befall a homogenous time but that structures it originally.’ (after The Gift by Marcel Mauss, 1925).
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always in excess of measure, in excess of its-self, value is what cannot be possessed. Shimmer, gloss, pulse, value is the qualitative edge of the being of relation. 1
There is an undercurrent of feeling in favour of
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The snails that E. and I collected in the creek sit in a jar on the kitchen windowsill for two weeks, two weeks in which it feels like everything begins to become undone. Between the storms we change the water and add fresh spinach leaves, which they make light work of, lacing them with holes, haphazard and beautiful in their asymmetry. Each morning we peer inside to assess their progress, their mouths rasping against the glass as we sip our coffees, the Polish morning radio just audible.
(probably from Italian intrecciare: ‘to weave’ or ‘to braid’), jump in ballet, beginning in the fifth position, during which the dancer crosses his straight legs at the lower calf.
astronomy based on the coordinated observation and interpretation of disparate “messenger” signals. Interplanetary probes can visit objects within the Solar System, but beyond that, information must rely on “extrasolar messengers”.
The four extrasolar messengers are electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and cosmic rays. They are created by different astrophysical processes, and thus reveal different information about their sources. Wikipedia
This is year 6734 of the current Julian Period. Used mainly by astronomers, the Julian Period is a chronological count of years used to measure the interval between two events, to offer a kind of universal measure of time irrespective of different calendars, eras or chronologies. Starting on Jan. 1, 4713 BC, one Julian period spans 7980 years, which means the next cycle will begin in AD 3268, 1247 years from today.
Since its introduction in 1583, the Julian Date has been Reduced, Truncated, and even Modified to meet different needs, usually due to the limitations imposed by computer processing and memory. So much for all that universality.
“the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time” — Sigmund Freud
to shadow, indicate or typify beforehand; to prefigure; to pressage.
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sphere of the fixed stars, which according to Ptolemaic thought was believed to revolve around the planet earth. Also known as the Eighth Sphere.
see entry for Firmament.
These are used in Knitting patterns to save the trouble of recapitulation. When an asterisk is twice put, it indicates that the instructions for Knitting between the two asterisks are to be repeated from where the first asterisk is placed to the last, thus: Knit 3, asterisk Purl 1, Knit 6, Over, repeat from asterisk twice, would if written out at full length be: Knit 3, Purl 1, Knit 6, Over, Purl 1, Knit 6, Over.
When a row is worked to a certain stitch, and then is repeated backwards, either the place is marked by the letters A and B, or by a cross (+).
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A name given to Purl Knitting, but usually indicating the one Purled Stitch down the leg of a stocking, to form the seam, and which aids in counting the stitches.
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TO INCREASE: In plain Knitting, pass the thread to the front of the work through the pins and back again over the pins; or in Purl Knitting, when the thread is already at the front of the work, pass it over the needle and right around it, so that it again comes out at the front. The Over makes a new stitch when Knitted off on the next row, and the method of Increasing by Overs is one commonly employed in Knitting patterns.
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Similar to Over (which see).
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The manner of finishing.
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A joint petition.
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Petition has been refused
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To be able to assert ‘this is mine’ requires a subject to internalize the idea that one has proprietary rights that are part of normative behaviour, rules of interaction, and social engagement. This possession, which constitutes part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity, is also constituted socio-discursively.1
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) ↩
Held in language or in muscle and bone
You’ll know when you’re ready
