This week’s arts and culture column features a podcast (the only one I listen to, actually) I HIGHLY recommend: Haptic & Hue.
From the H & H website:
Haptic & Hue explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at how fabric traditions have grown up and the innovations that underpin its creation. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity.
All of humanity, not only women. This is a quality offering, and the people who make it do the world a great service.
Other news: The entire month of May in Tucson has been heaven. Temps haven’t yet soared to the uncomfortable 100-degree plus range. I spend each early monring on my front patio enjoying my aviary. A pesky ground squiirrel has teken up residence under an adcaent shed and keeps trying to dig a burrow in the back yard which I just know would extend underneath the house. Let’s just say I am an a first-name basis with several of the personnel at Termagon.
Also I see I’ve become a little too much of a hermit these past weeks. It will be good to spend the month of July in LA.
I’m re-reading and listening to and reading commentary on Kafka’s brilliant “The Metamorphosis.” I’m not the only one to notice a resemblance between Gregor Samsa and Christ.
One major thing Kafka gets at is the hideous existential fear we workers have of bosses. When the story begins, Gregor has set his alarm for 4 in order to catch the 5 am train, but has overslept till 6:30. Almost in passing, he observes that his office assistant will have been there to see the train go without him (Do all the workers live in the same neighborhood? The point is the sense of being always under surveillance and on probation), that his absence will already have been reported upon and noticed. He hasn’t missed a single day of work in FIFTEEN YEARS. And yet sure enough within minutes, the chief clerk is at the door of the apartment, demanding to see Gregor and that he explain his gross dereliction of duty.
This is exactly how I, for one, ALWAYS felt upon punching a clock waitressing and later working in a law office. Though come to think of it, I kind of still feel that way now, having been ostensibly self-employed for decades. Am I in trouble? Am I slacking off? Am I doing enough?
In fact, Kafka presents a particular interior state that I suspect is emblematic of many of us. The sense that we are here on sufferance, that we have to earn our place, that no matter how hard we work we are always a hair’s breadth away from being kicked off the island. He’s so terrifief of displeasing his employer that he gives much more thought to the prospect of losing his job than to the fact that overnight he’s been transformed into a giant insect.
This, to me, is the state of the human psyche without Christ. There is no way I could inch forward, little legs feebly waving, without the sense that, in spite of my fears, I am loved.
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