Thrums are the ends of silk threads left over from or cut off during the weaving process. They drop or are tossed into baskets at the side of the loom, & so fall into tangles
The bundles are objects of beauty in their gleaming piles of tangled-together luminous knotted random threads of different weights & colours. So you could just take one home & arrange it artfully on your coffee table as an objet d'art. Terrible dust trap though. Or you could use it as a source of gorgeous threads for your own embroideries
There are lots of ways you could think of analysing the bundle if you are of a more enquiring frame of mind. You could just observe, describe, record the colours in different kinds of light. You could pick it up & let it fall to see what kinds of different shapes it would make.
There are more scientific methods you could use for analysing the complete structure of the bundle, including perhaps analysis of the silk to pinpoint where the silkworms were bred or where the mulberry leaves that fed them were grown. You could weigh the bundle. You could clip a random sample of threads, weigh & measure them & use the results to estimate the total length of thread in the bundle
Given patience enough & time, you could carefully disentangle all the threads. Lay them out in order of length, colour, thickness. Of course it would no longer be a bundle. But if you had kept meticulous records of the disentangling process you could perhaps put it back together again
Even as a mere human, you stand in relation to the bundle as Godels logician stands outside the system, or Archimedes stands ready to move the world with his lever (a knitting needle would do). Or perhaps as God surveying his universe
But what if you were some microscopic creature living deep inside one of the twists or tangles?
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There is the material for jokes, once you have decided what’s funny. There is the evidence from which histories can be written, once you’ve decided what’s relevant to a particular interest. Until then there’s just a great undifferentiated, overlapping tangle, without sense or even sequence, waiting for someone to discover a few loose ends & pull out a few usable threads, then to weave them together into a usable fabric - Michael Frayn: The Human Touch
