Editorial – Playing string figures and CAT’s cradles: An edition of embodied entanglements

Deborah Green

String figure games are practices of scholarship, relaying, thinking with, becoming with in material-semiotic makings… cat’s cradle is a game of relaying patterns, of one hand, or pair of hands, or mouths and feet, or other sorts of tentacular things, holding still to receive something from another, and then relaying by adding something new, by proposing another knot, another web. Or better, it is not the hands that give and receive exactly, but the patterns, the patterning. Cat’s cradle, string figures… can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship is like that too; it is passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching. (Haraway, 2011, p.15)

I’ve always been partial to a juicy metaphor – one that, when approached using James Hillman’s (1983) invitation to let it run around on its own legs, can take us new places. Donna Haraway’s (2011, 2016) string figures is just such a metaphor. Strung and gently knotted together in this edition are many creative contributions that resonate with Haraway’s (2011) entanglement of string figures and scholarship. Like the cat’s cradles described above, these research articles, professional practice pieces, creative works, podcasts and book reviews twist and tangle with and through each other in intricate patternings that reflect the sustained accepting and giving that characterise our profession of creative arts therapy (CAT). Haraway (2011, 2016) uses string figures (SF) as a powerful vehicle for re-imagining worlds, introducing several nested and entangled SF practices that employ creative thinking with/through science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fact, so far… (Haraway, 2016). She approaches these as all carrying ‘response-ability’ in their mutual creations, representing the combination of various “methods of thinking thoughts and telling stories together in ways that emphasize a shared nature of giving and receiving, of participation, of crafting, tracing and following” (Museum Fatigue, 2020, para.1). (The modernist composer, John Cage [1957, p.10], referred to the word ‘responsibility’ as “response ability”, shifting the emphasis from an ethics of accountability to an “aesthetics of engagement”.)

Akin to our embrace of the creative arts within therapy, Haraway’s (2011, 2016) playing string figures within these notions is not mere artifice. Rather, she attempts to “outline a practice for generating imaginative patterns of thinking and ultimately being that may lead to ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ of our present” (Museum Fatigue, 2020, para.3). These processes – like our various sympoietic CAT practices – embody ways of connecting and creating kinship between the human, the other-than-human, and the more-than-human – relational inter- and intra-actions which sometimes work and sometimes fail, are sometimes active and sometimes still. Haraway’s (2016) sympoiesis, meaning ‘making with’, used within our CAT context, acknowledges the intricate tentacular imbrication of “I-make-the-art-and-the-art-makes-me” (Green, 2021, p.20).

Our attention to crafting CAT practices that are world-worthy yet also reach beyond mere representation and re-enactment of present troubles is exemplified in this edition. Like Haraway’s (2011, 2016) string figures, each published piece suggests “a method for working together, collaborating and recognizing the power of fabulating and fabricating – thinking and making – together to live in the trouble, the way things are” (Museum Fatigue, 2020, para.3) while also inviting “knowledge-making and world-making” (Haraway, 2011, p.2). And knowledge-making and world-making encapsulate our foundational intentions as scholartists, as CATs and as editors of this journal. Haraway (2016) could be describing our CAT practices as they are featured in this edition when she writes that these “inform a craft that for me is relentlessly replete with organic and inorganic critters and stories, in their thick material and narrative tissues” (p.2). Our sympoietic CAT’s cradles are “patternings, risky co-makings, speculative fabulations”, because “thinking or making cat’s cradle with string figures… is not an innocent universal gesture, but a risky proposition in relentless historical relational contingency” (Haraway, 2011, p.15).

Within these risky co-makings during troubled times, our CAT work involves “passing patterns back and forth, giving and receiving, patterning, holding the unasked-for pattern in one’s hands, response-ability” (Haraway, 2011, p.5). And this reciprocal sympoiesis transpires not only between therapist and client, but between the authors and editors and reader-viewers of this journal. This points to the ways that how we do and how we ground what we do – with each other, with our words and worldings, with materials and matter – matters. Drawing on the ideas of social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, Haraway (2011) states:

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (p.4)

We cannot therefore denounce this world in favour of an ideal world – and this edition is full of thickly described approaches taken by CATs as they strive to stay with the trouble of this world while birthing new worlds, grounded in the knowing that our decisions in sessions take place in the presence of those who will bear their consequences (Haraway, 2011).

Held within the tentacularity and provocation of this CAT’s cradle metaphor, I now trapeze towards the rich collection published in this edition. My one set of hands cannot adequately play string figures with so many richly woven threads, so I simply offer a way in, the first of a giving and receiving invitation.

I begin by tweaking the newly forged mycelial threads connecting Caryn Griffin and Daniel Wong into our editorial entanglements. While further details appear in the Editors’ section, here I ask them to lean into the string figure metaphor with me and introduce themselves with line drawings and traceries of poetic words. They respond, Sheridan joins in, and a playful zipline of words and wonderings creates new patterns of giving and receiving between us.

Welcome to new Co-Editor Caryn Griffin as she haikus and line-draws herself into our tangles

The line twists turns loops

Passing byline of my mind

Stretching drifting off