knotted lines

These fibres call to mind the pieces of rope used by the Maori and mentioned by Victor Segalen in his novel Les Immémoriaux (A Lapse of Memory): the Polynesian bards or narrators would recite their poems by heart, with the aid of interwoven strings, the knots of which were counted between their fingers to mark off the episodes of their narrative. It is not clear what correspondence they established between the succession of names and deeds of heroes and ancestors on the one hand and the knots of different size and shape placed at different intervals along the strings on the other; but certainly the bunch of threads was an indispensable aide-memoire, a way of making the text permanent before any form of writing.

—Italo Calvino, “Say It with Knots,” Collection of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), translated by Martin McLaughlin