Art Credit: Vincent van Gogh – Weaver
THE TRICOTEUSE
“A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn’t think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it.”.
– Vincent Van Gogh
A heddle made of cord or wire, suspended on a shaft of a loom has an eye where each thread of the warp goes through. There can be near a thousand heddles used for fine or wide warps. This reminds me of world religions .Are we not all the warp and weft of a giant tapestry ?
Whether it is a Charvet or a carpet of the finest silk from Herat, the weaves are similar and the warp cannot exist without the woof. Does it matter then which faiths we follow ,whether we worship only the threads from which the fabric was woven or the fabric as a whole?
While living in Nuenen in 1884,Van Gogh made paintings and drawings of weavers over a six-month period. In these paintings, there’s a feeling of distance, like someone looking into the scene. In Weaver Facing Left with Spinning Wheel,* the painting is made with somber colors, contrasted against the woven red fabric on the loom.
Are we then the Moirai or Madame Defarge measuring out our fellowmen’s’ lives in yarn to cut them down at will?
such stillness-
the cicadas’ song sunk
deep Into the rocks
Notes:
1) The Van Gogh quote used is from https://www.createspace.com/4465772
2) First published in a slightly different form in KYSO Flash (Issue 6, Fall 2016) http://www.kysoflash.com/Issue6/DeodharTricoteuse.aspx
About the author:
Dr. Ms Angelee Deodhar, an eye surgeon by profession, a haiku poet, translator, and artist lives and works in Chandigarh, India. Her haiku, haibun and haiga have been published internationally in various books and journals, and her work can be viewed online, too. To promote haiku in India, she translated six books of haiku from English to Hindi.
She is editor of the Journeys series (Journeys, Journeys 2015 and Journeys 2017). Journeys 2017, the third anthology of international haibun, has just been released on Amazon.
Art Credit: Vincent van Gogh – Weaver – Wikimedia Commons