Jody Rosen on seeing knots:
Once knots come into focus, though, you can’t stop seeing them. Rifle history’s back pages and you’ll find them everywhere. …. There are, of course, metaphorical knots: the knot in our stomachs when we’re nervous, the “certain knot of peace” that ensnares us when we sleep, as the Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney wrote. We speak of marriage as “tying the knot,” a figurative knot that is likely derived from literal ones — from so-called true lovers’ knots, various knot forms, found everywhere from Scandinavia to East Asia to Mexico, that symbolize affection, commitment and betrothal. It would be possible to write not just a history of knots, but a history of the world viewed through knots.
I love stories that teach us to see something ordinary that was there all along. At some point, The Scranton Times, my childhood local newspaper, syndicated the comics, and every Sunday morning my father would sit me on his lap and read me the Comics Section. Newsprint thumbs and index fingers, he would crinkle the paper, straighten it, and begin.
See also:
The science of shoelaces
“Wizard of Id.” “Andy Capp.” “Dagwood.” It’s hard to articulate the particular way he would say these words. Not words at all, but consonants. As if “Id” was made of an entire alphabet of “D’s” and “Capp” an entire language just of the sound “P” makes when it pops through ones lips and hangs in the air.
For me, each Sunday morning, the world was made of consonants. Stories as non-vowels. Later, beyond comics, I adopted other ways to look at the world: through pauses, constellations, underdogs, endless lenses. What other ways of seeing and hearing do we use?
