Monday, October 16, 2006
Bonding With My Ancestors
Long ago, from the genesis of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, my ancestors were there, working in the cloth & woolen mills of Wiltshire, England. I now feel more akin to them. Cathy, Claire, and I went to the Wigston Knitting Museum. A remarkable place...it is an old Victorian home with an adjacent knitting factory. Socks and gloves were its specialty. Apparently in the 1950's, the owner turned the key and left everything, untouched. It was a real treasure for historians to come in and find everything in its decaying Victorian splendour. It is now a museum. I am sitting in the factory, being trained on how to use the knitting machines. It was quite involved, not as easy as I assumed it to be. It was such a creative contraption and involved a lot of coordination with many different steps to follow, just like a complex dance! The work required much more concentration and physical labour than I thought. The noise emitted from the machines was excruciating. I got a keen sense of how man could become physically, mentally, and spiritually numb, sitting at one for 14 hours a day, in all states of weather. Like a dancing partner, he needed to become part of the machine to make it work appropriately. He would have to fight not to become a machine himself.
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