"L" is for Line

I can’t even recall what I was searching for in my new used thesaurus, but when I came upon the entries for “line,” I was hooked.

Anyone can come up with a handful of expressions without even trying, “My job is on the line.” “Sign on the dotted line.” “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.” “She crossed the line.” “Follow this line of argument.” . ..the thin line, the bottom line, the party line and so on.
Suddenly, I realize I’ve always been in love with lines. On the tip of my tongue are these classic lines:

Virginia Woolf used the metaphor of dropping a line in the water to evoke the inception of a thought process: “Thought . . . had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line . . .” (A Room of One’s Own 5).

Annie Dillard uses the image of a line throughout her small book, The Writing Life: “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. . . . The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illuminates the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm. . . . The line of words fingers your own heart.” (3, 7, 20).

Tim Ingold contrasts living a life assembled by connecting static dots versus living a continuous, vibrant line of a life: creative, dynamic, and generative. Ingold quotes Paul Klee on “the line that develops freely, and in its own time, ‘goes out for a walk’ [in contrast to] the line that connects adjacent points in series . . . ‘the quintessence of the static.’”(Klee: Notebooks, Volume 1: The thinking eye, Ingold: “Up, Across, and Along”)

In the short fable, The Dot and the Line: A Romance of Lower Mathematics, by Norton Juster, a line (male) is in love with a dot (female). The dot is in love with a chaotic squiggle, but the line learns to create one angle and then transforms himself into geometric figures of increasing complexity until he successfully woos his love. Juster apparently was inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 fable, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, where “women are straight lines [and] Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares . . . and . . . Pentagons” (7).

It seems that each of us has an important decision to make when it comes right down to the “line.” Where do you stand on the line? I’m going to take just one meaning to heart today: Ingold’s line that “goes out for a walk.” This is the kind of walk that “wends hither and thither, and may even pause here and there before moving on. But it has no beginning or end . . . every somewhere is on the way to somewhere else.” Ingold makes clear that his metaphor extends to how we know and narrate our experience of the world. “As with the line that goes out for a walk, in the story as in life there is always somewhere further one can go . . . it is in the movement from place to place—or from topic to topic—that knowledge is integrated.”

A line of words often does not proceed directly from point A to point B, but may meander and diverge, flowing like water that some would call aimless, but which can also be viewed as a complex and meaningful pattern. You may choose, on a familiar walk, to take alternative routes that add time and variety to your walk. Similarly, in writing, we may follow lines of words that do not immediately announce their purpose or meaning. Freewriting is based on this principle, as are some guided writing activities. For example, I begin by writing about the arrangement of books on my shelves and meander into meanings about deferring important conversations. A walk (or a piece of writing) can begin almost anywhere and, yet, pass by and accumulate breathtaking vistas, new insights, threads of connections, and ambiguity rich enough to feed you for many, many days and nights.

For your writing:
First take a walk (preferably) or a drive and choose a new route. Allow yourself to meander a little bit and then maybe a little bit further. Observe what you see and what you think about. Write about how this differs from the usual rush of getting from one destination to another without awareness of the experience between destinations. Another writing activity might be to take a common object and after describing it, let it lead you in different directions. “Take a walk” with the idea of this object. For example, choose a shoe in your closet. (Or your car, bike, briefcase, watch, etc.) Describe it first. Where has it been with you? What kind of support does it give you? What is your relationship with this object? What about the history of this category in your life? What thoughts does it elicit? Let your mind go off in tangents. You might begin with a shoe or watch and end up in Venice, your grandmother’s kitchen, or underwater.

Quotation for Percolation:“The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity.”
Friedensreich Hundertwasser (brainyquote.com)