Or let it break.
Water can lap at a sandy bank, keep pushing until it feels success. It can never unwind, release the tension, find the endpoint, settle for temporary reprieve. It seems everything must always be doing something, even if aways the same. Thus, the water understands frogs and grasshoppers singing through the night, but always singing the same.
We love to love, yet love is for when we desire procrastination, but even then we cannot find peace. Our procrastination brings no release of tension. Does this make our love affairs merely reflections of ourselves
Tant va le pot au puit qu‘il casse
The barton rope-maker spins his wheel, alone, out of sight, at the far end of the long shed, and watches the red thread disappear into the thick hemp. Who will ever unwind his work and find his thread?
Erda sits spinning, winding the threads of time yet knowing mankind will spoil whatever patterns she makes. She is weary, yet she never sets her work aside to stare into the distance. She knows the warp and that it holds the tension, holds the tapestry in shape but she does not interfere. She weaves the fates of gods and by implication, of men. Mother Earth, does not trouble herself with the destinies of women or goddesses for their task is to sweep up the mess left by the unwound heroes.
The marriage knot is the junction in Erda’s tapestry, not a removeable tie. Only an awful event in the twilight can unravel the tapestry and end the pattern, such as the Götterdämmerung in the Nibelung sagas.
In distant Calcutta a rope holding a snorting steamer to the dockside snaps during a tropical storm. All hands are mobilised to save the ship, so no one sees the Barton thread, drawn down to the harbour floor. Once broken, it is irrelevant.
The Hindu workers struggle with the ship. Their threads hold two destinies wound into one upon marriage. Only death, completion of life’s debt or renunciation of all knots, can untie the marriage bond.
The Buddhist knows better. When conditions change – the fixtures changes.
The Greek model has the knot unbreakable until death. Unless you are Alexander the Great, who, when faced with the impossibly complex Gordian knot, released the ox tied to the chariot by taking his sword to the rope and thus created the foundational gesture of mankind – if you can’t solve the problem, sever its conditions. His act is called metaphysical audacity, or a refusal to accept the frame of the challenge. Maybe he saw the complexity of the knot as the trap so sidestepped the trap. Or perhaps the knot was never a puzzle at all, but a threshold disguised as one.
Whatever, Alexander’s response was nothing new and the challenge has not yet been resolved. Didn’t the Victorian first-class carriages have blinds, not to keep out the sun, but the sight of the misery working people suffered to fund first class? Doesn’t the foodbank sidestep the challenge? Starvation is surely a threshold for someone.
For the Japanese the red thread can become slack or tangled or pull people apart for decades, but it never snaps.
Men, women, heroes, oxen, love, ships, ropes, destinies, gods, goddesses, frogs, grasshoppers, water at the sandy bank, the jug carrying water, are all destined to wind on until they loosen, are dissolved or fulfilled. The jug carries water until fatigue breaks it. We love until love breaks us. All things, all beings are part of the warp, which defines the world order. Only through resolution can the unwinding begin.
Or a hero – Alexander the Great or the ox for that matter, sidestep the wisdom of all cultures, resolve the Gordian knot with a decisive, unconventional, fate altering act and thereby condemn us to eternal unrest, but unrest is all we know so we don’t notice and we let ourselves be driven ever more.
In the Nibelung story Brünnhilde was Alexander’s sword swipe. Wronged by her lover and his dubious chums, denied her godhead by her Delboy father, she burned their house down and took the Gods and the heroes with her.
Men and women inherit that which is left after these great metaphysical audacities – or as I prefer to call them, ‘the great unwinds,’ – and we promptly recreate the circumstances for another great wind – until that breaks us, too.
With thanks to Eduard von Keyserling for the idea.
Clive La Pensée 