(University of Bristol)By Paul Richard
Knots made humans human.
They gave us lashings for the lean-to, bindings for the stone ax, packages with handles, and ways of hanging stuff from belts. From knots we got the bracelet, ways to tie the hair up, snares to snatch the rabbit, the basket and the bow.
But that was long ago. The technologies of tying are fading all around us. The knot's gone obsolete.
Kids can barely tie their shoes now. Their sneakers close with Velcro. The clerk, when you went shopping, used to tie your parcels up with string. Now they come in plastic. Surgeons laser-fuse and staple where they used to stitch.
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Think of what we owe the technologies of tying.
Without knots we'd be naked. Pelts slide off the shoulder unless laced together. Knots led us to the needle, and after that to weaving and every kind of cloth.
Without mooring lines and nets, the bowline and the clove hitch, we'd have never gone to sea.
Or high into the mountains. The ice man with the copper ax found frozen in the Alps knew nothing of weaving but much of knots. He'd tied eight different kinds of them. He carried spare rope and spare yarn. His shoelaces were long. His stone arrowheads were bundled with a string.
To knot, you have to comprehend, remember and repeat — as you do in ritual, as you do in art. Knots are tied to memory. The first rosaries were knotted.
To retrieve their long songs, the bards of ancient Ireland fingered knotted strings. Jews tie knots in the fringes of their prayer shawls.
Knots in painting are a presence. The most beautiful of all may be those on the pages of the Book of Kells. About 1,200 years ago, when that great book was produced on an island off of Scotland, and few people could read, its interweaving lines evoked Bible teachings. Those spiral interlacings with their leavings and returns were reminders of the teachings, now hidden, now apparent, woven in the Word, and the parables of Christ.
Leonardo drew knots. So did Albrecht Durer. Their ingenious intertwinings demand your full attention. Today few viewers bother. They're in too much of a rush.
Old knots of many kinds are found throughout museums. The snowshoes of wood and knotted thong in the National Museum of the American Indian are intricately tied, as are the 400-piece collection of Belgian, Parisian and old Venetian lace at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Medieval manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum include intertwined knots from a Carolingian Bible from France, from the 10th century.
The Library of Congress owns all 25 volumes of the series "Knots & Everything." The Inca of Peru used tied-together groups of colored knotted cords for recalling sacred numbers and calculating sums. To decipher their knotted mathematics, consult the "Code of the Quipu" by Marcia and Robert Ascher (1981).
Also on the shelves is the greatest knot book of them all, "The Ashley Book of Knots," published in 1944 and still in print. Its thousands of line drawings are so clear in execution, so mentally demanding, so full of lore and learning and intricate ideas, that they qualify as a major piece of early American conceptual art.
Clifford Ashley, born in 1881 in New Bedford, Mass., served what he would call his "apprenticeship in knots" aboard the whaling bark Sunbeam, "probably the last merchant square-rigger to put to sea with hemp standing rigging." Then he turned to art. He went to school with N.C. Wyeth and studied with Howard Pyle. Then he got consumed by knots.
In his book each knot gets a paragraph, a number and a how-to drawing. Some specialists contend his book has duplications, but I have yet to find them. His black-and-white line drawings number 3,854.
Lots of knots have lots of names. This was always confusing. Ashley's book pierced that fog. The knot once called the English knot (or the Water, Waterman's, Fisher's or Fisherman's) now is known to knotters as "Ashley 1143."
When Ashley joined the fleet, knotting wasn't optional. Sailors had to be quick with a knot to be any use at sea.
In peacetime, sailors had time to kill. And most couldn't read. Instead they turned to knotting. More than 100 pieces of their time-eating knotwork — fancy lanyards, fancy bell pulls, sheaths, picture frames, ditty bags and blackjacks — can be seen in the collection of the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va. (The museum also owns the illustrated manuscript of "The Ashley Book of Knots.")
Though a piece of string can be any length you wish, the action that's important takes place at either end. The same is true of knots. While one end pulls you toward the past through hemp rigging and lace, the other winds instead through immaterial mathematics. Beauty thrives there, too.
Here is one way to taste it. Go to www.knotplot.com, scroll down to "Ashley knots," then click on "Ashley 2334." When you click again, you set it rotating in space.
Ashley found No. 2,334 at the end of a bugle cord made by Seiderman Bros. of Philadelphia. Rob Scharein, of Vancouver, B.C., the computer scientist behind Knotplot, discovered it by leafing through "The Ashley Book of Knots."
Knot theory got started in the 19th century when the Victorian scientist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) had the beautiful but wrong idea that atoms were tiny knots tied in the omnipresent ether that pervades all space.
There isn't any ether, but before its absence was determined Victorian mathematicians had begun to study knots.
By 1877, P.G. Tait had classified all knots with seven or fewer crossings. Knot theory since then has blossomed.
The Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor, was won in 1990 by Vaughan Jones, a Californian windsurfer, for his "Jones Polynomial," an unexpectedly powerful and entirely abstract mathematical tool for distinguishing between knots.
Knots in Washington, a conference on knot theory, has been held annually since 1995 at George Washington University. "Quandles — their homology and applications" was the subject on the table the last time the conference met.
