(W)HOLE
The word ‘hole’ takes its root from the Old English hol, meaning 'perforation, orifice’. ‘Whole’, on the other hand, stems from hal, ‘uninjured, entire (body)’.
I first started caring about holes through my weaving practice. As I weave, I create void, holes
and simultaneously a
whole,
and realise that without acknowledging the undeniable presence of empty space, wholeness cannot exist. Suddenly, I see it.
w h o l e .
Looking at the organisation of the letters composing
‘w h o l e’ and ‘h o l e’,
I wonder how one letter i.e.,
‘w’,
can entirely alter the meaning of its contrary. We confront an issue of contradictory lexical semantics, in which a word is absorbed by its opposite. Paradoxically, as it perforates the uninjured, the hole simultaneously invites itself into what is entire.
In weaving, holes neighbour verticals and horizontals. Seemingly in-between, those size/shape-shifting entities are always bordering and bordered by ‘something’ else. Their duality might carry everything that oscillates between two states. Captured and capturing at the same time, one can wonder what is the story of
‘w h o l e’ and ‘h o l e’,
for the two exist in an unintelligible symbiosis. Published in The Pluralist Issue .21 Stories of Inbetween (2023)
