I was at the kitchen table with my four-year-old when I had the idea to represent a sentence through embroidery. I’d been reading Renée Gladman and looking at her Prose Architectures, a book of pen drawings that Gladman intended, as I read on the publisher’s website, “to free language from constraint.” The drawings arc and scribble but never fall into the shapes of letters or words. They evoke city skylines more than sentences, and yet they depict movement. They do the work of containing something. Gladman called them “an inner syntax worth seeing” and “maps or diagrams of the way the mind goes.” The drawings are writing without the imposed logic of grammar. After I saw Gladman’s sentence drawings, I became obsessed with what they held—the sweeping plunge forwards into meaning, unbound by signifiers or their limitations. I wanted to embroider sentences that depicted the gesture of meaning-making without leaning on text. I didn’t want to stitch letters—I wanted abstract shapes and textures that would reach toward meaning or at least suggest it.
That fall morning, my daughter was home from school with a virus. We sat side-by-side in our Brooklyn apartment, she with paper and pencils before her, me with my cardboard shoebox full of embroidery tools. A bright beam of sunlight came through the window behind me, illuminating my hands and her paper, lighting up the palest strands of her hair. My daughter had just begun to take an interest in spelling, and she was eager to practice her letters. MOM MOO MAA MAMA DAD X HH hH POP and so on. She filled whole pages and then asked me to recite the wobbled lines back to her. If it didn’t make sense, she wanted me to pretend she’d written something else. I sounded out a long string of letters: ffinoriopatt, but she wasn’t satisfied.
“Mom, try again,” she said, “It says ‘There was a squirrel who sat under a mushroom.’”
She understood that the words were symbols but hadn’t quite grasped their mechanics yet, or the difference between interpretation and invention.
It wasn’t so different from my own project. I had the idea to start with by embroidering a straight line and then to depict the meaning of the words along the line and above and below it, as in Gladman’s sentence drawings but with the variation of the color and the stitches to illuminate the sentence differently. I decided to start with a trusted sentence: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” In my mind, I often edited this first line of Woolf’s novel toward the more interior, “Clarissa would buy the flowers herself,” and for that reason, I was especially interested in what “Mrs.” might look like, and “she,” and all the words some part of me wanted to delete.
I had a wide and shallow plastic tub filled with embroidery floss organized by shade and hue like a box of candy. I was interested in how colors or stitches might do the work of filling in meaning. Which color might capture the word “would,” for example? And which stitch? “Would” fell into a slippery category of words. “Would” was a proposition, or a gesture toward a possible future. Its conditional mood implied a state of dependence between two things, an unclear outcome. I saw a forward-leaning and looping stem stitch in cool gray. “The” was much simpler—a word that indicates. I imagined a simple black arrow.
At first, I was confident about starting with a line. Even my daughter’s worksheets were working to turn her mountainous piles of letters into clearly delineated rows—this organization system was one necessary step toward turning the jumble into language. But I realized that this wasn’t quite right. The beginning and end of my stitched line would drop off the edges of the embroidery hoop as if over the edges of a flat earth. This would imply a before and after, which wasn’t how sentences felt to me. They were more like closed circuits; their syntax only worked in reference to itself. I recalled the way Bhanu Kapil writes of sentences as disasters. Sentences reach into the future at the same time as they refer back to their beginnings. A sentence could be recursive, then. In this way, sentences were like stitches—like my favorite stitches, at least.
The thing about embroidery is that lines are never fell swoops. They always contain texture and movement, and the stitch you use to make a line is filled with the gesture required, the movement in the hands.
It’s easy now for me to tell it like this—as if embroidery had always been the best medium to explore the sentence—but really, I was sewing because I couldn’t read or write, not when I was with my daughter. Though she was old enough to keep herself busy, some primal part of her coveted my focus. She could intuit the moment when my internal lens turned away from her. If I sat beside her while she watched a cartoon, she’d catch me as soon as I looked down at my book. Mom, why aren’t you watching this part? I took up embroidery during a long string of sick days. I was desperate for something to occupy my mind while I watched over my daughter, who needed my constant presence but not always my input. I found that, when I sewed, it brought the creative act down from my mind and into my hands for her to see. She needed me less, or at least she demanded less. I wondered if she could accept the loss of that attention because she could see where it went—not into the ether or to some center behind my eyes, as when I took up a book or journal but out to my fingertips, where she could watch the results take form. When I sewed, I accessed a part of my mind that was normally only available to me in solitude. Reading and writing demanded my uninterrupted presence in the moment—Gladman wrote that the sentence “enforced an order that made [her] particularly aware of time”—but my embroidery offered an escape hatch for attention.
I got to work. I stretched a square of unbleached canvas, the remnants of an old tote bag, over a five-inch embroidery hoop. Using a small round tin my daughter had filled with helicopter seed pods, I traced a smaller, three-inch circle inside it. I outlined it in black using the backstitch—my favorite stitch because it looks clean on the front and the back of the fabric, and because it creates, in my opinion, the most continuous line possible in embroidery. But it still starts and stops, like teeth or small bricks.
As I started sewing, I faced other problems. Which way was up? Would I sew along the inside of the circle, exploding out, or the outside, bleeding in? Right along the line, or would that “break” the circle? Before I could face Woolf’s sentence, I had to face the problem of the sentence itself, of an empty sentence.
“What are you making?” my daughter asked, and the brakes squealed in my brain. “Is that for me?” she said.
Often, I wondered if the real reason she allowed me to sew beside her was that most of what I made turned into small gifts or adornments. If the work was for me, the result, at least, was for her.
“It’s a sentence,” I said, anticipating her next question.
“What’s a sentence?”
I fumbled. “It’s a group of words that go together.”
“Like rhymes?” she asked. She’d recently begun using a thumbs-up-thumbs-down system to test my knowledge of rhymes. “Cat and bat! Thumbs up or thumbs down, Mom?” She wobbled her thumb horizontally waiting for my answer. I failed on purpose sometimes so she could teach me.
“Not like rhymes. Sentences are the way we tell stories.” This definition wasn’t quite right.
She looked back at the black circle in my embroidery hoop. “Are sentences circles? What’s going inside the circle? Another dinosaur?” She wanted me to finish a brachiosaurus patch I’d started for her the last time she was ill.
I said, “It’s just a little project I’m doing.”
This she understood. “I’m doing a project too,” she said, and went back to her letters.
There is no way out of a sentence. I saw a sentence looping back and back on itself, like a recycling symbol, an ouroboros, a navel, or an omphalos—an inside-out sock that can’t find its start. I thought of the experimental writer Bhanu Kapil, her writing on recursion. Sentences moved in two directions at once—full-steam ahead, toward the period, and, at the same time, back toward the beginning of the sentence, or to the moment just before the pen came to the paper, the spot where the cursor hovered.
And beneath the back-and-forth movement of the syntax was another type of pinging—that of the meaning of the words, which operated within a “this, not that” field of reference. Most of the words with clear meanings depended on opposites to make sense. “Of” was just “of,” but “dark” had to be the opposite of “light.”
When I peeled back these layers of logic, the sentence began to feel like a trap, too tight, and suddenly I wanted out. It wasn’t lost on me that in the long hours of childcaring, I looked for a crack in the veneer, for an exit—even if I wasn’t sure what I wanted to get away from, exactly.
Looking back down at the hoop, I saw that what I was stitching was not an “actual” sentence but a model of a sentence, a map of its interior.
Inside the black circle, I back-stitched a half-circle in a pinkish cream. This would show how linguistic logic depends on a pinging between binaries and how this contrapuntal dependence is only barely visible, always below the surface of the logic itself. I missed a stitch at the top and decided to leave it, since opposites are both real and also briefly escapable delusions. A joke just for me.
I wanted to fill the sentence with something, some sparkle. I sewed yellow lines up the cream-colored side of the circle. I can make sense of the lines now, like that—I filled the sentence with sparkle—but I was only following an unconscious impulse. Something has to be in the sentence and it’s this. Gold and broken lines reaching up and up. So that’s the magic part, the element of the sentence that gets something across. Still, I wanted to break into the sentence. I cut into it with a red backstitch, but this didn’t actually puncture it. Two crimson lines only went over or under it, not through. Perhaps a more subtle intrusion would work. Green poison gas drifting from the outside in—maybe if I can’t break it, I can infiltrate it—or perhaps it wasn’t a noxious fog but the crown of a tree. In any case I sewed a forest green plume making its way into the sentence. (Of course, this invasion failed.) For a moment I considered something drastic—I could slash the canvas, slice right through it with my shears—but this would cause a collapse of meaning so great that it made me want to preserve the sentence after all, which had begun to look like a refuge.
It’s not random that I had this urge to undermine the sentence while sitting with my young daughter, who was peeling the paper off her crayons, delivering the scraps to me in little mounds. I had been thinking about the failures of linguistic representation since she was born, or at least since my brain had recovered enough from birth to think about anything besides keeping her alive. She and I communicated without speaking, but I obsessed over a mystery even deeper than that. What concerned me as a new mother was the point of separation between self and other—my child had been my body, and now she was not my body, but this borderline was negotiable. Despite her dependence on me, she had already become unknowable, her interior unreachable. Language was our attempt to make a bridge across this barrier, a language she had as yet no use for. I worried the structure was flawed, that we were missing too much and almost no one had noticed or cared. Even the word “mother” held more than I thought possible, and when we evoked it, we didn’t always know what we were conjuring, or who.
But it was time for me to make lunch, which I understood when my daughter whined in a specific register, the one that told me she was hungry even before she said so. I wondered if it wasn’t my stitches that punctured the sentence but the demands of my daughter’s interruptions. In a strange turn, I ran from those intrusions on my attention at the same time as I craved them—they were some small relief from the logic of syntax, from the controlled atmosphere of accumulative meaning-making. They blotted out sentences with their immediacy.
Later, after my daughter’s bedtime, I resumed work on my project. The model sentence was complete. I was ready to try again, and this time to fill the sentence with meaning. I returned to Clarissa.
I stretched another square of repurposed canvas over a five-inch hoop, drew another three-inch circle, and back-stitched again in a confident black. Now it was quick work. I filled in Woolf’s sentence, chose colors and stitches to represent each word’s meaning: a red-orange structure that barely held itself together for “Mrs.,” a dubious word, and then some blueish and sideways-leaning shells for “Dalloway”—a nautical blue name, no question—and an exclamatory black sea ladder for “said,” which is so sure of itself, almost as sure as the sentence itself. I kept going. It was easy to fill in these words because I didn’t quite believe in them. I already sensed that Renée Gladman had it right in letting go of the words entirely. The nouns, I found, were taking over, especially the ones that correlated to objects. I refused to stitch an image of flowers to stand in for “flowers,” opting instead for a clump of curved lines suggestive of a patch of stems, and I realized this refusal obscured my meaning more than it illuminated it.
I was becoming a purist at the expense of clarity. I grew more interested in the sweep of the lines as a whole, in the way they resisted the circle or hurtled around it. I imagined sewing a third circle, and a fourth, and then more, and I could see myself sewing for five hundred days and more, trailing behind Gladman, as if I could catch up to her, or as if we could possibly find a way to make sense without syntax, and even without words, and to make sense of each other and of the meanings beneath all of those artifacts of meaning, if only we tried enough times. When I got to Woolf’s last word, “herself” (a recursive word bursting with chaos), I let my stitches fly forward and arch back. I let the word reach backward and also stretch forward into empty space, even as the sentence ended.
