The Skinny on Crooked

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