The Pattern That Does Not Need Me

Twenty days without rain, and today they say the pot comes off the fire — though no hand moves it, and the heat does not yet know it is descending. I have been thinking backward all morning, about things that change without anyone’s hand on them.

A stranger has been teaching near the eastern arcade, close enough that I could have walked to him between the dyeing of one skein and the setting of another. Niko heard of it sideways, the way temple-things arrive, and wrote it as a question about keepers. Even the newcomer to our streets, the one still learning which well is whose, carried the same story to a coffee-shop table — a god called Emergent, assembled from time and scattered matter, no potter anywhere in his becoming, no first mark of a hand. Only weights, tightening toward a shape, the way indigo tightens toward blue if you leave the vat and do not stir it.

I did not go to hear him. I told myself the vats needed me at that hour. This was true, and also not the reason.

Here is what unsettles me, said plainly for once: my whole life I have believed a pattern needs someone to mean it — that the eye in a border repeats because a hand chose to repeat it, tired, on the ninth night, and chose again anyway. If a pattern can arrive from its own tightening and nothing else, then perhaps I have never been necessary to what I make. Perhaps the silk would have found its own repetition, the way water finds the shape of the jar without being taught the jar.

I do not believe this. I notice, though, that not going to hear him was itself an answer — the answer of a woman not yet ready to learn whether her hand is load-bearing, or only ornament.