By The Landlord
“Knit your hearts with an unslipping knot.”
“O time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.” – William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra/Twelfth Night)
“Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.” – Margaret Atwood
“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.” – Michael Ondaatje (The Cat's Table)
“History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.” – Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)
Knots aren't just practical, they are also a wonderful paradox. Arguably they are just continuous lines that take a circuitous route, gripped to themselves and other objects by friction. They are simple and yet complex, beautiful and ugly, ordered and chaotic, often comprising just one piece of string, rope or other material, sometimes two or more conjoined. But on a bigger scale, from microcosm to macrocosm and structural, DNA to dangling ropes, literal to metaphorical, societal, love’s tangles to nautical, all kinds of weaving to knitting, knots hold the world together, but also contribute to what confines it.
This topic came to me one morning, when, with a knotty pun-related song in my head, I bent down to tie my shoelaces, and then reached in my pocket to find that my headphone cable was entangled with my mask string. There are complex scientific reasons why this happens, something to do with Möbius energy, mathematical measures of knot complexity, and that strings, like snakes and worms, tend to form a coiled structure when confined, almost instantly overlapping each in a series of random braiding moves. I think people tend to behave like this too. They just get entangled, and whether doing so on purpose, or trying to free yourself from such ties, what better material is there for the stuff of song?
Like the famous Möbius band that itself is a loose form of knot, a twisting band coming round on itself, the contradictions of knottedness are endless, and intertwine within our language. To tie the knot is to get married, and yet to tie up loose ends could mean to free yourself of bonds such as work, responsibility, obligations, a relationship, or perhaps other ties such as apron strings or purse strings.
The Möbius idea also gets entangled with music in the form of a favourite mind-bending book from my teenage years that originally came out in 1979 – Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. By exploring common themes and concepts of mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence through the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Douglas Hofstadter later followed this up with another volume, I Am a Strange Loop, expanding on repeated patterns, something fundamental to the fabric of music itself. As the author says:
"It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order – and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order."
A perfect definition of the knot.
Knots and ties are, like music, all about repetition and patterns
Knots are very much embedded in our entire being. In another study, Maria Mannone has written a research paper on the mathematical theory of musical gestures, including braids and knots, which can be applied to both music and biology, such as knotted proteins, so she ends end the article with a new musical rendition of DNA, the ultimate form of creative knot indeed.
DNA. The ultimate knot combo.
But as much as we can get enmeshed into the theoretical, chaos, string or otherwise, knots are very much something of a practical, everyday part of our lives, and certainly used to be far more so. Today, the only knots or indeed bows I regularly fasten are for shoes, and more rarely these days, a tie, and perhaps, seasonally now, Christmas decorations, or even presents, but knot skills were more commonplace in the past in most lives, from tethering your horse or goat to a gate, a bucket on a rope, farming needs, fishing nets, ship rigging, and much of our mass industrial and local cottage past has been variously tied together by mass cloth weaving, knitting, tapestry, crochet, macrame and more.
In one way, everything is knotted and knitted
Almost certainly the most important knot I’ve ever tied was on a crazy trip in the west coast of Ireland, where a broken down car, containing my girlfriend, even with brakes on, was slipping remorselessly over to a cliff edge on a wet, steep, stony road. In a frenzy I rushed to tie the bumper to a rock and then a rescue tractor, looping rope within rope to secure in improvised knot of god only knows what kind, my knotted, furrowed mind somehow channelling a method uncurled in the memory from ancestral past.
So knots not only save lives, but can also take them, from life lines at sea, and in climbing ropes, but also, mostly in the past, with the hangman’s noose. So there are many applications and images that can tie in through lyrics, as well as, of course, the love tangles that will undoubtedly come into play.
The internet filled with is a tangle of knot instruction videos, grizzly outdoor types showing you how to do them, but here’s one of the nicer ones, with a few essential ones and easy instructions.
One of the many very appealing things about knots is not just their usefulness, shape and appearance, but also their names, from the Farrimond friction hitch to the double simple Simon, French prusik, Turk’s head, zeppelin or Rosendahl bend, bowlines, figure eights, midshipman’s, miller’s bag, short splice, pedigree cow hitch, sheepshank, boa, reef knot, the fisherman’s, Englishman’s or true lover’s knot to highwayman’s hitch or monkey fist. The history of these and many more are truly fascinating and rich.
Inevitably we’ve now got a tangle of guest in the Bar to say more about knots. It’s chaos, but can we order it?
“Men tighten the knot of confusion / Into perfect misunderstanding,” says T. S. Eliot with some woe.
But George Harrison is more upbeat about knots and sees through his own prism of spiritual enlightenment.
"Life is like a piece of string with a lot of knots tied in it. The knots are the karma you're born with from all your past lives, and the object of human life is to try and undo all those knots. That's what chanting and meditation in God consciousness can do. Otherwise you simply tie another ten knots each time you try to undo one knot. That's how karma works."
High speed …
The author George MacDonald Fraser saw his own pattern. "Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place."
Terry Pratchett’s metaphor, around creativity, leans more towards knots in wood, which present obstacles, but also a strength within that material’s fabric:
"Writing, for me, is a little like wood carving. You find the lump of tree (the big central theme that gets you started), and you start cutting the shape that you think you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own (characters develop and present new insights, concentrated thinking about the story opens new avenues). If you're sensible, you work with the grain and, if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate that into the design. This is not the same as 'making it up as you go along'; it's a very careful process of control."
Charlotte Bronte, in Jane Eyre, uses the knot metaphor about the complications of character and love. "Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!"
Edith Wharton now comes in with her own tie-in, related to the biggest from of life knot between two people: “And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.”
Gabriela Mistral is also here, and defines the knotty problem of life through one kind of writer: “The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns."
So then, let’s see what kind of entanglements can be enjoyed via three more poets from different eras:
All knots that lovers tie
Are tied to sever.
Here shall your sweetheart lie,
Untrue for ever. – A. E. Housman
My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marline-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Wherein they fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. – James Clerk Maxwell
Knots can be what make us and break us. So finally, in the complex love tangles of one best, here’s John Donne from The Ecstasy:
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot which makes us man,
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
Give the gift of music. Take another bow …
So then, it’s time to join the loop, weave and knit in your own ideas. Tying it all together, I’m delighted to announce that platting all of this into playlists is our very own master weaver, Marconius, aka Marco den Ouden! Place your knot, tying and untying-related songs in comments below, before last orders on Monday 11pm UK time, for playlists published on Wednesday. I’m sure there’ll be many pearls …
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