Taut Lines
I’m drawn to ropes and knots: books about knots, diagrams of knots, knot apps, paracord and ropes sold at hardware stores. Knots can be elegant solutions to otherwise difficult problems, like making a clothesline, pitching a tent or keeping your shoes on your feet. They can also be difficult, vexing solutions to simple, everyday problems if you can’t quite remember how they’re supposed to be tied.
I’ve tried regularly practicing knots like the double sheet bend and the tautline hitch, but it’s only been somewhat successful. (Same with napkin folds, but luckily napkins work perfectly even when they’re not folded.) I remember some of the knots I’ve practiced but not all, and my memory of them seems to be very specific as to which direction it starts from and how it’s oriented. It’s almost like I just can’t grasp what’s really going on with anything more than a very simple knot so I’m reduced to rote memorization. It’s like memorizing a poem in a language I don’t understand.
Perhaps this is a clue: I could read proficiently in kindergarten, but couldn’t reliably tie my own shoes. I was apparently good enough at reading out loud that my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Fasnacht, would sometimes let me sit in the big chair and read a story to the other kids while she went outside to have a cigarette. (I have been told this repeatedly, but my personal recollection is a little fuzzy. Like much of the 70’s, it sounds so wrong but feels so right.) I was poor enough at tying my own shoes that Jenny Barnes had to help me on several occasions.
It doesn’t make sense that I would be able to interpret these strange little marks strung together on the page better than I could manipulate a short length of string. It doesn’t seem reasonable that I would be able to follow the thread of a story and not be able to thread the ends of my shoelaces together in a useful way. Then again, actually weaving a story that will hold another person’s attention is much harder than simply reading one: the knotty problem persists.
And there’s the underlying principle: tension and connection. A rope simply provides tension—everything that a knot or a rope can do is because it can provide or withstand forces pulling on both sides of it. A simple line can tether us to something else with a little skill and attention: my shoe (and I) on the bight of my shoelace and Jenny on the two working ends; Ms. Fasnacht, my classmates and I bound together by the lines of a storybook.