Saturday, March 25, 2006

Knot and Vortex

"Of patterned energies; and first, Buckminster Fuller on knots. He grasps and tenses an invisible rope, on which we are to understand a common overhand knot, two 360° rotations in intersecting planes, each passed through the other.

"Pull, and whatever your effort each lobe of the knot makes it impossible that the other shall disappear. It is a self-interfering pattern. Slacken, and its structure hangs open for anlysis, but suffers no topological impairment. Slide the knot along the rope: you are sliding the rope through the not. Slide through it, if you have them spliced in sequence, hemp rope, cotton rope, nylon rope. The knot is indifferent to these transactions. the knot is neither hemp nor cotton nor nylon: is not the rope. The knot is a patterned integrity. The rope renders it visible. No member of Fuller's audience has ever objected (he remarks) that throughout this exposition he has been holding no rope at all, so accessible to the mind is a patterned integrity, visible or no, once the senses have taught us the contours.

"Imagine, next, the metabolic flow that passes through a man and is not the man: some hundreds of tons of solids, liquids and gasses serving to render a single man corporeal during the seventy years he persists, a patterned integrity, a knot through which pass the swift strands of simultaneous ecological cycles, recycling transformations of solar energy. At any given moment the knotted materials weigh perhaps 160 pounds. (And 'Things,' wrote Ernest Fenollosa about 1904, are 'cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots.')

"So far Buckminster Fuller (1967). Now Ezra Pound (1914) on the poetic image: '. . . a radiant node or cluster; . . . what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' A patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words. 'In decency one can only call it a vortex. . . . Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.' For the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water."

(Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 1971, pp. 145-46)