Knot

KNOT

‘He was shaky when he stepped on to the quay with his ropes.  He crouched under a streetlamp, doing and undoing a bowline knot that wouldn’t come out right.  Finally he had to recite, “Over and under and over and round and over and under and through,” a raw cadet again.’

                                                                                                               Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land  

                                                                                                               (1985)

I remember learning knots at Brownies, or Guides perhaps – though why on earth..?  Now I only recall three: the simplest granny, the essential reef knot, and the round turn and two half hitches, the last in name only.  I can make the initial loop, then I’m stuck.  I do like them, though: something about their finicky precision, their predictability, their clarity – unlike most things in life, there is a clear right and wrong.  Get it wrong, and it simply doesn’t work.  Like cat’s cradle, a single mistake leaves you with a tangle on your hands, or sends you back to the start.

Apart from the contorted little knobbles that school embroidery taught me, knots also signal mastery: a male word for what I regard, shamefully perhaps, as a male competence.  They are a part of that world of big ships and technical knowhow, engines and coordinates and hard science, which seems to me resoundingly masculine.  Yes, I know, I know: Ellen Macarthur and Amy Johnson and all my own years of dedicated feminism.  I fought for equal pay, prefer (usually) to open my own doors, will defend the right of women to box professionally.  But strong calves leaping onto the quayside to make fast my (my!) boat seem part and parcel of varnished mahogany boards and splicing the mainbrace, essentially male pursuits.

I am not entirely in awe of such skills.  There is a bar in La Trinité, on Brittany’s south coast, with a glass case of knots on the wall.  It’s a delight to while away a wet hour or two over a glass of beer while contemplating the difference between an Anchor Hitch and a Fisherman’s Bend.  But isn’t there something slightly unhinged about these uniform rows, carefully labelled like butterflies pinned out by their wings?  As quirks go, though, it is of a piece with the same small town’s award system for the annual sailing regatta: the winner in each category receives his (all the champions we saw were men) body weight in oysters and champagne, determined by his standing on one end of a plank until the crates and boxes piled on the other end of the rickety seesaw send him wobbling into the air.  Only a man could have designed such a quaint discriminator.   The opportunity for subverting the system, though, bears the stamp of the women who added the weekly shop and bunches of flowers to their men’s kilos.

Fishing undermines further my already dubious notions of gender.  Fishing flies have the intricacy and attention to minute detail that we might associate with embroidery, essentially in the popular view a female pursuit, although the needlewoman I know best is a man.  The Flyfisher’s Companion (John Buckland 1990) provides an absorbing distraction, drawing on a history that dates back to the third century AD.  The fisherman (Buckland assumes readers and practitioners alike are male) might also have been a peripatetic fly-tier complete with a travelling kit of materials and miniature tools that look as if they belong in a jeweller’s studio or a dental surgery.  Whilst artificial flies these days are likely to be made of synthetics, traditionally the fly-tier might have used fur, feathers, silk, wool and hair to imitate the real food of the fish.  Whether the finished fly is an attractor (to stimulate the fish to attack) or a deceiver (to represent a natural food form), the results are typically fine and delicate, a miracle of shimmering iridescence. 

Non-fishers will be more familiar with notions of attraction and deceit in relation to people rather than trout or salmon, and the knot has often been associated with both positive and negative in human endeavour.  Tying the knot calls to mind the marriage ceremony and probably rests in the tradition of binding together the wrists of the couple, although I rather like the suggestion that the knots represent the web of knotted string that predated the metal bed base.  The knot here symbolises commitment, a promise that the relationship is for ever.  It implies security: like the knot in a climbing harness, it keeps us safe.  But when the partnership sours, the ties that bind can become the ropes that keep us captive, an inextricable mesh of unhappiness:

               JACK    You are a pain in the neck

                              To stop you giving me a pain in the neck

                              I protect my neck by tightening my neck muscles,

                              which gives me the pain in the neck

                                             you are.

               JILL      My head aches through trying to stop you

                              giving me a headache.

                                                                                                                        R.D.Laing Knots (1970)

The natural world echoes the dichotomy.  Japanese knotweed is, according to the World Conservation Union, among the 100 worst invasive species, its spreading roots and vigorous growth crowding out other species of plant and damaging foundations, roads and buildings.  At the other extreme, the knot garden is a model of control, its neat pattern and formal arrangement containing an aromatic assortment of herbs.  If you are a birder, the word itself may well have the connotation of spectacular.  The biggest autumn high tides at Snettisham on the north-east coast of Norfolk create the phenomenon where tens of thousands of the wader that bear the name take to the skies en masse when they are crowded off the mud-flats by the incoming tide.  I experienced this with friends recently.  We got up at 4. 30am to a sky full of stars and trudged and stumbled along the side of the lagoon in a straggle of other lunatics with binoculars and telescopes.  The man behind me had driven the nine hours from Cornwall the day before, just for this event.  Like me, this was his first time.  We stood, watching the shrinking mudbank emerge in the half-light as not mud at all but a moving mass of heads, legs, beaks all scurrying in the same direction, with increasing urgency.  Now and again a flurry of dunlin whooshed across our field of vision.  And then it was happening: swirl after swirl of knot took to the air in front of us and wheeled over our heads into the lagoon. 

 

In some respects this was a modest event: a mere 30,000 probably rather than the 60,000 or 80,000 of the records, and the sun hadn’t yet made it over the horizon so we missed the jewelled effect of the best photos.  Still it was something extraordinary, lit by eos rhododaktylos, the rosy fingers of dawn, to the tune of the background bedlam of the birds cries like the half-heard chaos of a distant party.  And of course the clicking of all those cameras.