Three Ways to a Silk Shirt Pamela Gillilan (1918-2001) You have to kill for silk and it's not easy. Those chrysalides make themselves so private in their tight shuttles, so safe that they can dare to lose themselves to metamorphosis, abandon the known body and endure who can imagine what liquidity before another form takes shape. They must be murdered in the midst of miracle, their cerements reeled off, the long continuous thread saved pliable, unstained, the severing bit of the emerging moth forestalled. The method's suffocation -- the oldest way by baking in hot sun; but this hardens the thread, makes unwinding a hard labour, risks soiling by windbourne dust, is wasteful. Steaming's another way -- the plump bolls held above a boiling cauldron for eight minutes then for eight weeks spread out to dry well-aired, so that the corpse in the shroud desiccates slowly, leaves no stain; but sometimes the chrysalis survives. Surest is heated air. A single day exposed to the technology of fans and ducts, the flow of arid currents, and the pupa's void, a juiceless chitin spindle shrivelled back from the close wrappings drawn and spun out of its former self -- now to be unwound and spun again: woven, dyed, cut and sewn, collared and cuffed. --

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