The
Skinny About Crooked
“I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains, I looked to the
children, I drank from the fountains, there’s more than one answer to these
questions, pointing me in a crooked line, and the less I seek my source for
some definitive; the closer I am to fine.”
hese lyrics by the Indigo Girls
speak volumes in terms of looking at our culture and finding some need to
deconstruct and reinvent; there are some aspects that poke their verbal heads
up that need some real serious work done around them. What am I talking about? As I grew up, I often heard the words, “stick
to the straight and narrow path of righteousness”. We talk about doing what is ‘right’ (as in a
right angle, perhaps). We talk about
‘getting even’, which is an expression fraught with difficulty and expressing a
bankrupt philosophy of vigilantism and circular anger, where there is no
justice, forgiveness or unconditional love (a concept that bears looking at).
In Spanish the word for straight and the opposite of left is derecho,
which originally refers to wind storms that are not like the tornado (tornillo,
screw), which twists and turns, so derecho means a strong
straight-moving wind. In the criminal
oriented lingo, culturally, we talk about going ‘straight’ or being an upright
citizen and about doing thing ‘right’.
The crooks are the criminals who are crooked. The gays are ‘bent’. The definition of the word ‘definitive’ (a
word sung by the Indigo Girls): A definitive answer is a final one; a decision
by a court of law is one that will not be changed; means authoritative,
conclusive, final, absolute, ultimate, supreme, a defining or limiting word. I
think it also means to show the shape of and I am veering towards crooked more
than rectilinear as a model for, well, beauty and truth and morality. I
favor cultural thinking that respects
un-straightness as being ‘closer to fine’ ; as in, ‘every little thing is going
to be just fine’.
The arrival of fractals and, especially, the work of “Benoit
Mandelbrot ( 1924 – 2010) who was a Polish-born, French and American
mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences,
especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of
physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a
"fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of
fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well
as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.”
– Wikipedia
The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers that are,
basically, Z (squared) + c (a constant), resulting in absolutely amazing and
dazzling shapes, twisting and turning and feeding itself in both large and small
scales, infinitely and fractals and self-similarity turn out to be profoundly
universal and are easily seen on coast lines and drainage system. What is
important here is that the natural world displays crookedness constantly on all
scales (having self-similarity) and so what we see and experience every moment
that we view landscapes and viewscapes of all sorts are crooked lines; curves
where, for instance, the human body can be very similar in shaping to sand
dunes or hill country; jagged, craggy, roughly domed and almost never, ever
straight. The horizon looks straight,
but that is because it is so far away. A
grass stem is straight-ish but never perfectly straight in any way shape or
form, but immediately punctuated with curves as it works with gravity, leaves
and tufts, gradations of girth.
The Greeks concentrated on geometry and proportion and
eschewed numbers as somehow ugly, leading to the Socratic notions of ideal
perfection at the root of all good. This
fed very well into western civilizations values for centuries, only recently
broken by the ultimately compelling notions of Einstein where space is variable
and curveable and time is not absolute, where spooky entanglement and quantum
physics blasted into our world and is zeroing in on our consciousness, bit by
bit. Numbers and being and nothingness
and uneven-ness rise up as the new norm.
So why do we refer to straight as being good and crooked as
being bad. Here is my argument: I think that most religions and our more obscessive-compulsive
sorts of value systems are based on the idea that we need to conform to rigid
ideas, adhere to the ‘priests’’ admonitions to be spiritual and do not get
attached to ‘things’. Immediately, there
is an irony, because the word spirit in Hebrew, for instance, is rua,
which is the word for wind, but if I think of wind, I immediately think of
swirls. Because the wind is mostly
invisible, I get the connection, but I want to meander here in favor of even ‘spiritual’
being un-straight. In my mind, preachers
do not want the general population to be attached to things because the church,
as it were, often grabs the things themselves and keep the populace tithing and
staying relatively poor and humble. That
may be a jaded comment, but I think that there are reasons for maintaining the
wealth and the male chauvinist adultist power structures that are entangled
with obsessions of various sorts (including depicting nature and the forest as
dark and ominous; roots and branches as witch habitat) and trying to redirect
the cultures around them to shape up to these rigid value systems. It is well known that religions, in
particular, have projected humans and especially male domination over the
earth, the natural world, women and, sadly, children. So nature (crookedness) is pitted against the
church (straightness) and other OCD-based values in this culture and I think it
needs to change and the people need to think of nature as full of light, among
other aspects, and crooked as a wonderful natural value (like fractals and
landscapes) and that straight and narrow is just that; anti natural and narrow
minded. If we do not do this, we will
not be able to progress as a civilization, as we will poink ourselves
and shoot ourselves in the foot with our own words, which actually help guide our consciousness and our daily
behavior.
As a ‘natural’ artist, these
concepts are particularly poignant; my spheres are more like buffalo gourds,
whose lines are wonderfully natural, as our eyes naturally discern. The shapes of tree roots and branches can
engage in ‘Lovetangles’ that resemble
animated humans. I do not hate straight
lines, in fact, as a furniture maker I routinely work with table saws and tools
of all sorts that chew out sharpness and straightness. I think the world can, though, shift some of
the subtleties around and land on fertile ground for working with and
respecting the successful nature of crookedness and subtle touches of being
hand-made and more in tune with the natural world, which is not a perfect
sphere!
There was a crooked man and he had a crooked smile; he found
a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile;
he bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse; they all lived
together in a crooked little house; well this crooked little man and his
crooked little smile; He took his crooked sixpence and he walked a crooked
mile; He bought some crooked nails and a crooked little bat and he fixed his
roof with a rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. They ate a crooked dinner on a very crooked
table; in came a crooked horse; from a crooked stable; they all had crooked
dishes, in many crooked styles and after every bite, they smiled great crooked
smiles.
Or…
There was a crooked man who had a crooked smile; who lived
in a shoe…for a while … grew up wild..."
Again, there is a wonderful story that I heard about a tree
in the forest and the young tree was bent over and crooked for some reason and
all the other trees were straight and tall, overly proud and condescending and
the tree was sad because it was so different and thought itself ugly, but then
the foresters came and cut down all the straight trees for wood and left the
crooked one standing and the lesson is that being different and curved and full
of character is sometimes a really good thing.
According to the most common thinking regarding the origin
of this rhyme, the character, “crooked man”, could be Scottish General Sir
Alexander Leslie, set in the early 17th century during the reign of Charles I
of England when, despite the animosities on the border between the English and the
Scottish, a peaceful coexistence was needed and, I guess, found. Differences
were tolerated and made more interesting; similar to the crooked tree story.
-Art Young
Happy Meandering!
-Thor Sigstedt, Sept 6, 2019
