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

speck or flash

I begin my pictures under the effect of a shock that makes me escape from reality. The cause of this shock may be a tiny thread sticking up from the canvas, a falling drop of water, or print made by my finger on the shining surface of a table.

In any case, I need a point of departure, even if only a speck of dust or flash of light. This form produces a series of things, one giving birth to another.

And so a single thread can set a world in motion. I come to a world from something considered dead. And when I give it a title, it becomes even more alive.

Joan Miró, I Work Like a Gardener (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017), compiled by Yvon Taillandier, preface by Robert Lubar.

threaded line

The line as a single thread by which one could see and feel a whole cloth.

metaphor multiplies

The thread of a poem turns out to be a rhizome.

thread or read

Breaking the block: Read until you find a thread. Better yet, read until your head explodes.

silken line

A poet often does more and better than he is aware at the time, and seems at last to know as little about it as a silkworm knows about the fineness of its thread.

—Walter Savage Landor, The Pentameron: and other imaginary conversations (1889)

not obscure but a blur

[Browning] is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realize with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward as it lives along the animated line of its labor, springs from thread to thread and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man’s as the speed of a railway to that of a wagon or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway It is hopeless to enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his writing except with a mind thoroughly alert, an attention awake to all points, a spirit open and ready to be kindled by the contact…


—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Browning’s obscurity,” 1875, reprinted Swinburne as Critic edited by Clyde K. Hyder (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)