daydreamer's footnotes

As an ultra beginner at knitting who only skills in that were to do knit and purl stitches, I spent the week trying to learn to do a cable pattern. I am still learning it as I am writing this, and I think I am getting nowhere. I followed the pattern chart religiously and still can’t see the cable pattern at all. Maybe I have to repeat some more rolls before the pattern show itself… or I have been doing the whole thing wrong. I even tried to follow some (not very good edited) YouTube video on how to do it, but nope, I am not getting what the content creator was able to achieve.

Perhaps this is just a big learning curve I have to keep experimenting and a big hurdle to overcome. Keep failing and find the flaw in the workflow and fix so you can achieve more later after a very slow start. Perhaps the week wasted failing is not at all a waste of time. Perhaps this period of failing is what it takes to do better art in the near future.

I keep trying different art form to find my own workflow and visual language. It’s like trying to learn a new foreign language in the hope to communicate with people in their native tongue. However, I, myself, am not native to their languages, so I added my twist, flaws in the grammars, and pure guesses and interpretation on how I should say a sentence in a language I tried to learn.

It’s the same for art. Through evolution and learning development, a new workflow is form. People coming up with better ways to do things more efficiently. Productivity over true knowledge. No one is a true master on anything, one just have to be a productive worker on doing something. to survive in the capitalist society.

However, there are times when I feel I need to dig deep into the fundamentals, understand the logic behind each building blocks, before I can dive into learning the shortcuts. The real learning only comes when one goes through the brain exercises of failing and achieving at every steps. Without it, one is simply follow a manual or instructions. One is only exercising the mechanical part of the human body without taking advantage of the cognitive part of our body that truly differentiate us for being human.

Without flexing our neuroplasticity in the brain, we are not truly living as a full fledge human being. So in a way, an artist is a working master of the living. We go through all the trouble of learning a chosen craft that is deflated in value in the capitalist society because we value true knowledge – the fundamental building blocks that created the society in the first place.