I have a thread box. It matches my button box, not only in size but also in purpose. The spools of thread filling this container are remnants from the days that I tried my hand at sewing. Other than the few new spools that I’ve purchased in recent years strictly for mending, most represent a garment from the past, none of which still hang in my closet. I can select one of the spools, hold it in my hand and reflect on the garment in this color that I made years ago.
A friend, who recently made a new dress for her adult daughter, exclaimed, “Do you know how hard it is to sew with black thread on black fabric?”
Anyone who has ever picked up a needle and thread to sew, hem or mend understands her frustration. But Rosanne Cash, eldest daughter of the legendary Johnny Cash and an American singer/ songwriter in her own right, sees far more than a long, thin strand of cotton, nylon or other fibers, in the concept of thread.
Fashion designer, Natalie Alabama Chanin, in trying to teach Cash to sew, told the singer, "You have to learn to love the thread.”
Cash reflects, "I know she meant it as practical advice, but it seemed an apt metaphor for the thread of life, one that became part of a song lyric for “The River and The Thread,” her album released in 2014. Cash acknowledges Chanin in the credits of the album.
Carl Wilson with Slate Magazine explains, “The lyrics on “The River and the Thread” fittingly abound in road references. But the title - in a move that proves characteristic of Cash’s method here- adds further layers, through two other symbols of pathways that ribbon through landscapes and lives: River for the coursing currents of history, geography and culture that shape the South. And thread, for the more personal strands of genetics, memory, and even literal fabrics - cotton and clothes- that entangle Cash herself in that complicated place...The road is a river; the road is a thread.”
His analogy reminds me of a line from Alfred Noyles’ poem, “The Highwayman.” We English teachers often use it as the perfect example of metaphor: “The road was a ribbon of moonlight.”
The term “thread” is often used as metaphor just as Cash does, but writers use it in more ways than metaphor. Each piece of fiction is a tapestry created by the threads of plot lines that an author weaves together. With Aesop, the fable writer, we expect his thread to be the moral that he restates at the end of each story. Even if this author did not spell out the aphorism in his last sentence, we would still learn the lesson because he has pulled the thread of truism throughout the vignette.
More complex tales include multiple threads - enough to keep us reading to the end, but not so many that we lose count and give up. It’s a fine line that an author walks, but those who can master it like a high wire artist, not only capture our interest early, but also keep us reading until the last page.
Tamin Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York, says, “I think multiple threads are important because what we wait for in fiction is that moment when they intersect and reveal new meanings in each other. “
While the threads are obvious in fiction writing, they may be subtle in nonfiction; but nonfiction writers and journalists still appreciate the importance of threads holding a story together as much as any seamstress crafting a gown. In journalism, the threads are always the five “Ws - who, what, when, where and why” plus “how.”
Without threads, they all - garment and story - fall apart.
Fashion designer Michael Kors says, “The biggest lesson that I've learned is that fashion is this tightrope where you have to be consistent but inconsistent. You need the connective thread but at the same time you need a sense of surprise.”
Threads hold fabric and literature and music together. Oscar Hammerstein realized this symbolism when he penned the lyrics of “Do-Re-Mi” for The Sound of Music. Listen and you can almost hear Julie Andrews, as Maria, teaching the children in her charge to sing. “Do - a deer, a female deer; Re- a drop of golden sun; Mi- a name I call myself; Fa - a long, long way to run; So- a needle pulling thread...
2017
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