...by request (from my writing buddy Ellen)...I have posted a vintage piece.

String Theory by David E. Gilbert

Out of chaos comes order. But how that actually happens has been the source of discussion since before language emerged from human lips. Now comes String Theory, proclaimed by the physics community as the unifying explanation for all fundamental questions of nature. It’s a theory of everything—all attributed to an invisibly small dancing filament called a string. Strings—the mother of everything.

Even though I didn’t take physics in school, I still have a crude impression of time (always late) and space (not enough). Chaos strikes me as a hopeless mess without resolution. Strings, however, are easier for me to grasp. But they also have a tendency to get tangled up. It’s a theory I can relate to because it’s strings that pull chaos together in an orderly fashion.

As stings are attached to everything, it’s no surprise they play a leading role in cosmology—the origin of the universe, not formulations of blush and mascara. There’s the big bang and the notion that there was absolute nothingness before something. Now that stings are pronounced as principal performer, I have formed my own cosmology about the space-time continuum, inspired by an observation made not in the laboratory, but in my living room.

While watching the nightly sports on television, Kimi had taken to sharing my space and time continuum with a big tangle of string—not any string, but very fine emerald green silk fiber. A universe of garments promised to emerge from such chaos. With the patience of a saint, she sat there ferreting out the mess that spontaneously sloughed off of the big spool bought on discount. Like a hopeless morass of monofilament fishing line, she has for weeks, with little perturbation, been working her way through the knots back to the original order of the big ball. A less diligent person (me, for instance), observing the few feet of disorder in light of the miles intact on the spool, would be inclined to accept the loss, cut the string and move on to the creation act. But despite my constant prodding, she persevered, finding strange solace in the troubled mass of string.

With a world full of different creation myths, why would it be any more far-fetched to believe that there in my living room, I was witnessing the rebirth of the universe crocheted from a ball of string?

After weeks of silent persistence, sometime in the 3rd quarter of a game, I glanced over to see that she was already four inches into a new scarf, which had meant that she, without the least fanfare, had resolved all the problems of the universe and had simply gone on to the creation. No big bang. Just eloquent silence and deft handiwork by my very own earth mother, revealing an orderly fabric rendered from a wad of verdant stringy starting material.