How to Untangle a Necklace
And the riddle of femininity.
First, it’s less tangled than you think.
Unless you spent your wee hours in an Ambien trance, bowlining the heck out of an innocent 12" chain, all that happened is your necklace lay on a night table somehow perplexing itself.
Still, nothing unperplexes easy. And the nature of the tangled necklace is that you’ll forget what you know about its not being tangled. You’ll lose patience. You will in fact knot before you unknot — and, if you’re like me, you’ll reknot everything because you can’t forgive yourself. The necklace will come to represent your internal mystification. What’s worse, it will represent your drive to deepen your own mystification, and make it permanent.
The good news is that a countervailing drive will kick in immediately. Never will you want something more than to untangle the necklace. You will hate the chain, you will break the chain, rather than let it lie. You will move heaven and earth.
When Sigmund Freud tackled what he called “the riddle of femininity,” he magnanimously gave women credit for inventing— for possibly inventing — a single technology in all of human history. Alas, he began — and I give this in bold in deference to Freud’s unerring wisdom:
“It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented — that of plaiting and weaving.”
We plait, then. We weave. Wouldn’t you know it, Freud goes on to elucidate: This minor invention evolves out of the deep craving to coif our nether regions. As usual, Freud was spot on.
To see women untangling necklaces is to know that, while we’re as usual not inventing anything, we nonetheless heroically unplait. It’s compulsive. We establish overall visions for the untangling. We use ad hoc strategies. We pivot. We decide that the problem is now here, now here. That we need to zero in. That we need to walk away.
To untangle is to achieve focus without flaw, which is not to say with 100% concentration. Focus works best, in my experience, at the untangler’s sweet spot of 75%. In the balance of the brain, what’s left when you’ve jammed the puzzle receptors with a solvable puzzle, remain freedom and imagination. Easy inspiration — and detailed and stirring memories — arrive. As the fingers parse the chain, the non-motor mind runs wild.
The other morning, as my hands kneaded a snarl of pink gold, my mother’s theory of this kind of partial occupation came back to me. When raising children and keeping house, she told me, she’d found it maddening to do something that occupied her so intensely — and yet fell just shy of entirely.
My brother and I should have guessed. We knew her to be brilliant and we even took pride in how unriveted she was by meal planning or school events. She was, in fact, floridly underemployed. This realization hit us the day we came home from school to find our mom had, between nine and three, created a clay reproduction of a medieval castle, exactly to scale — architected, fired, detailed and stained. It had a little well in the town square glazed to look as if brimming with water. Another day she read the complete works of John le Carré.
She needed a job. (She got one.)
My mother believed that the shard of concentration and time left over in childrearing was professionally unusable. A string too short. Too short, that is — except for spy novels and castle-building.
I like to tap the real culprit knots in a necklace with the bottom of a glass or a phone, the better to loosen the knot and put millimeters of space between its sinews. My gaze now lives in crannies; there’s a microchemistry to this.
Today, when I found the very same pink-gold necklace tangled, I built to-scale mental castles, too. I remembered my mom and her rhythm with young children, swaying between intense and idle, and then became determined never to try to optimize my life for that same rhythm. Or, worse, to try to turn it into a theory of something awful like “motherhood.” I’d just to behold it, right there, in retrospect.
Who knows how much time had passed? Nothing was going to stop my picking, strategizing and untangling. It had been at least fifteen minutes when all the knots suddenly slipped. I’d lost some time. I clasped the necklace at my nape, straightened it like a tie, and went to work.
