He sits at his loom with all the stature of a master weaver, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond his work and his craftsman’s hands measuring each delicate thread as it comes off the shuttle and falls into place at a perfect right angle to the warp.
There is a slow, quiet meter to his work.
Close your eyes and you hear the treadle being pushed toward the floor, the frames rising and falling in counterbalance with a mechanical “thunk” on the loom. The shuttle whisks as it glides on the warp, too quiet to be called a whisper.
What develops just under David Herman’s wrists is a work of art masquerading as craft. It grows inch by inch in mixtures of deep brown and gold and off-white, the fabric revealing perfect herringbone marching along the sides, with a much more subtle pattern up the middle.
He will never see the beauty of his own work.
He will never hear the shuttle’s rattle or let his mind dance to the dependable, measured cadence of fabric being woven. He will never join fellow weavers in the unending debate about color and the blistering complexities of fabric construction.
He is blind and deaf.
The fact that he is sitting at the loom at all is remarkable enough. But here he is, as faithful and dependable as a good clock, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the basement of the Kagan Home for the Blind on West Foster Avenue.
Herman is an old man now, nearly 80.
He puts his arms out and feels the air with his long, delicate fingers as he walks, moving to his own, private rhythms in a search for the door frames and small landmarks that serve as guideposts in his dark, studiously memorized world.
What can be observed from the outside is that he knows where his loom is, and he knows where his work is on the loom and what he must do to complete it. He is a most careful man, working fluidly but cautiously, always checking his edges and meticulously setting the measure of the thread as it comes from his shuttle.
It is a cliche to say that blind people develop other senses.
It is not a cliche to say that David Herman can feel the progress of his work, keep its edges straight enough, know its repetitions so well that his product reflects a true craftsman’s dedication.
An outsider not familiar with the art and craft of weaving might view all of this as so much repetitive task. To be sure, there is a repetition to weaving that might seem dulling to the uninitiated.
But it is an unforgiving business, one of those exercises that emphasizes one’s mistakes because they are in plain view for everyone to see, embedded in every inch of cloth that comes from the loom.
What weaving has become in the basement of the Kagan Home is more akin to mission than craft. It is what Herman does for a living, what he produces that will be in use long after he is gone.
“It provides a sense of accomplishment, a sense of going to work, a sense of having produced something at the end of the day,” says Bob Lieberman, executive director at Kagan.
People pray in the tallisim Herman has woven, rest their heads on his pillow covers, brighten their lives with the colors and designs he has never seen.
A victim of meningitis
Herman’s story–and a lot of stories that sound very much like it–is a common one at the home, a sheltered workshop for the blind and vision impaired.
Stricken by spinal meningitis as a 3-year-old in Burlington, Iowa, in 1920, he was the first blind person ever allowed to attend Iowa’s State School for the Deaf, admitted by special order of the state legislature.
He left the school at age 12, then lived at home for 47 years with his family. Like so many other disabled people who thrived in the embrace of their families, the times and circumstances changed around him as he aged.
A dozen years ago, his family too old and not strong enough to care for him anymore, he came to Chicago.
What he discovered here–with some help from the North Shore Weavers Guild and the coincidence of a loom that showed up in an unexpected place at just the right time–was a challenge to help fill the next part of his life.
Claire Zerkin remembers her first visit to the home in 1985, when the call went out to Weavers Guild members for help with a loom that had been donated to the home.
Looms are complicated devices that command attention and loving care at regular intervals. She expected to find wreckage when she arrived. Instead, she found a top-quality loom at rest, awaiting only the expertise of a real weaver and the miles of warp string it takes to feed the device.
She took command as a volunteer but soon was added to the staff at the home. David Herman was one of her first students. Zerkin, whose husband has helped maintain the dozen or so looms at the home, invented her own way of teaching the blind the weaver’s craft.
She still has the index cards she used to convince a poorly sighted woman named Lucy to take a chance on this most visual of crafts.
“LUCY COME WEAVE,” one of the cards says.
Zerkin anticipated Lucy’s answer that she could not see to weave.
“LUCY, SEE WITH YOUR HANDS,” the second card says.
Over the past dozen years, Zerkin and a handful of volunteers–Susan Olofson, who joined the staff two years ago, and Lois Sacksteder among them–boiled the mechanics of weaving down to their essences and found a way to open the craft to people who cannot see.
Weaving is both geometric and mathematical and lends itself well to computer design. Zerkin uses her home computer to create the patterns the blind weavers will use.
She and the volunteers actually put the warp on the looms, a time-consuming task that involves winding on hundreds of feet of yarn or thread and then carefully threading each string through hundreds of heddles and, finally, the teeth of a steel reed.
Then the weavers take over.
Robes, scarves, rugs and more
Herman never has to weave alone.
Mildred Rapp, 87, from Rochester, N.Y., and a resident at the Kagan Home since 1992, sits at her loom on the other side of the room, working on what might be described as an endless scarf of mixed yarns. She appears to have a few yards woven already and a few more yards to go.
She can recall the distant colors of flowers from her childhood, long before anyone knew that retinitis pigmentosa would be stealing her sight bit by bit as she aged.
“I can’t see the colors, of course, but I know how they might look,” she said. She weaves her scarves for friends and family.
Bob O’Malley, 74, who has lived at Kagan for nine years, works at a loom in the middle of the room.
He is creating throws, the latest addition to a collection of fabric that includes very natty heavy wool for his own bathrobe, rugs, scarves and pillow covers.
He knows his colors, too, recalling that he was handy at painting screens in his Near North Side Chicago home as a child. It was meticulous work, calling for just the right amount of paint. Too much and the little holes in the screens would clog up and make a mess.
He always had trouble in the movie theaters as a child, he said, because his eyes just would not adjust to the poor lighting.
“Even as a little boy, I would just have to go in and let my friends try to find me. I just couldn’t see in there,” he said. It was, of course, an augury of what would happen to his eyes later in life.
He is immensely proud of his bathrobe. It is a major-league bathrobe of thick wool, something one might expect to find Lionel Barrymore wearing in a 1930s movie about an old, but stylish, man confined to a drafty castle in some very damp part of England. The person who wears it should also probably have a red fez, thick wool slippers and a huge leather chair to sit in.
O’Malley said when his feet got cold, he wove a wool rug for his bedroom. He also wove the coverlet that is on his bed and his own rudimentary kilt, which he likes to wear over his shorts when he goes to ballgames.
“I have an image of what I am weaving,” he said. “But it comes from what I feel in the fabric. I can feel it if something is snagged or something is a little out of line.
“They give us a vague idea of how it all looks. I can remember the colors from my childhood.”
Art and the artists
Is there some unintended irony at work in this process that creates art that its creators can never see?
Probably not. What a person sees at the end of the process of art, after all, is not process but product. What artists live for, on the other hand, is not necessarily product, but process.
Heddi Newman, program director at the home, agrees that the concept of blind weaving itself presents a plateful of philosophical questions about the meaning of art and craft and the role it plays in the artist’s life.
“The art of doing it is where the satisfaction is,” she says.
Lieberman sees it from a different perspective. He has vastly expanded the size of the program since its inception because of what it represents for the residents of the home.
When he is in a penny-pinching mood, which must come frequently at a small non-profit home that doesn’t view itself as part of the nursing home beds-for-bucks bonanza, his gaze will sometimes fall on the weaving room, along with the thought it might all be a bit smaller for budgetary reasons.
“When I think, maybe we ought to save some money, maybe we should cut back a day on the weaving,” he said. “Then I come down here and look at it and I say, `Nah, no way.’ “
