Knots (Part 1)

Eli comes down to breakfast wearing a knit cap with an orange spice tea bag dangling from it.  “It’s so I can sniff it throughout the day.”  He holds it to his nose, deeply inhales, then lets it drop.  The bag hangs near his ear and gently sways.  Eli’s in the fifth grade.  “I double-knotted it,” he says beaming.   

I had already been thinking a lot about knots.  For over a month, instead of writing, I have been tying knots into baker’s twine (I keep a spool on my desk for gift-wrapping).  The knots began in September with some bad news about HAPPILY which isn’t doing as well as the publisher thought HAPPILY would do.  The numbers are low.  They tell me the numbers.  I unspool and nervously tie so many knots into what began as a long, thin string but is now a red and white lump like the lump forming in the back of my throat.  Maybe HAPPILY, I think, should never have been a book.  Maybe I shouldn’t even write books.  Maybe I should just tie knots into string until I make a knot bigger than me.  A sinuous, overgrown wild thing I could learn, eventually, how to feed. 

“I really hate the word ‘decay’,” yells Noah from the other room. 

The HAPPILY news arrives in September, so by October 7^th who cares.  I want to write about war, and hate, and evil, and exile.  I want to write about fire, and the kinds of fire that never cease.  Instead I tie more knots.  I tie each string to a stick and wave it like a shredded flag.  Am I a citizen of this country?  I am.  A lone patriot of my country of knots.  Here I am in my newly rebuilt office, marching back and forth, waving a shredded flag.  Here I am surrendering, but to what I still don’t know.       

There is a form of ancient writing called Quipu.  Instead of an alphabet, the Incas used knots sometimes referred to as “talking knots” or “threads that speak.”  I have been studying the Quipu for months, imagining it not like a book I could read, but like a book I could grow wizened and gnarled around. Like a book I could grow into.

       

Even though I am mostly writing in knots these days, or trying to, I find a sentence in my notebook: “If only all day we were handed pages from the dead to translate.”  What this was in reference to, I don’t remember.  I think it was in reference to the dead. 

I click open the news.  They have opened a human corridor.  Before I close the window, there is a loud bang.  A few neighbors rush outside to find out what’s the commotion.  “What happened?” we call out to each other, our knotted nerves frayed.  A squirrel has chewed through a wire, electrocuted himself, and blown a transformer.  I root around in my heart for more space to mourn.  There is always more space to mourn.  This is the strange, terrible miracle of the human condition.                  

Noah is learning about the tallit he will wear for his bar-mitzvah.  The tallit is a four-cornered prayer shawl with knotted fringes, each knot symbolizing the 613 guidelines for conscious living through a Jewish lens.  “And you shall have the fringe so you will see it and remember God’s mitzvot…” (Numbers 15:39).  The tallit is a spiritual home Noah can always wrap himself up inside.  My beautiful wandering boy draped in knots.  A country he can take wherever he goes. 

The publisher calls.  The HAPPILY numbers are dropping.  How is that even possible, I wonder.  Who is returning my HAPPILY for a full refund?  I tie one hundred more knots.  The publisher calls again.  Now you sold only one HAPPILY.  Soon none.  Soon it won’t even be translated into its original language.  Soon less than none HAPPILY’s.  In a year, minus thousands and thousands of Happily’s.  Unless, I am told, a miracle happens.    

Eli comes home with no tea bag dangling from his hat.  “What happened,” I ask.  He had knotted it so tightly.  “Kaboom,” says Eli.  He makes an exploding gesture with his hands.  “It burst.  Tea everywhere.”  I pick a dried leaf off his sweater.  And another.  And another. And another.