The Line; or, How I Understand My Body

When I took a printmaking class last fall, I was obsessed with line. Shape, color, and texture were certainly interesting from a craft standpoint, but it was always the lines I reacted to viscerally. They seemed to possess character, gesture, personality, life.

A solid shape on paper, my instinct told me, depicts a physical thing, maybe even a living thing. Say, an elephant. But I couldn’t make myself instantly perceive that an elephant-shape represented aliveness. Unconsciously, I recognized the shape of an elephant, but it took some effort to interpret the elephant-shape as alive because I know an elephant should be alive. Only then did the elephant’s pose become meaningful. As the function of a living, nerve-lined body, it became a gesture rather than a shape.

A line took no cognitive effort to understand as a gesture—it was all gesture. The moment I saw a line, I sympathized with it emotionally. After that, maybe, I would think about what it was meant to depict (if anything). 

Because a line contains no mass, its gesture isn't restricted by physical limitations. It need not be part of a body. Instead, the consciousness the line seems to contain is wholly devoted to the emotion it is expressing; it is emotion given autonomy. In terms of elephants, I feel like the trunk, more line-like, has the greatest potential to express feeling. An elephant’s trunk is less inhibited by the physical realities of its hefty body, and more able to perform a gesture unto itself. Likewise, a dog's tail acts as a kind of emotional rudder, channelling its mood regardless of what the rest of its body is busy with.

My inspiration in the printmaking class was how the emotion expressed by a line could never quite be articulated. (And what art can be?) Meanwhile, a written word consists of lines, but succeeds at articulating a specific thing. This means that any piece of writing contains two meanings, the linguistic meaning and the emotional meaning expressed by the lines. And, crucially, these two meanings can never perfectly coincide. (Try to write “joy” in such a way that expresses absolute joy and only joy. Or "elephant" with pure elephanthood.) This tension, I believe, is at the heart of arts like typography, calligraphy, and graffiti. It’s also at the heart of my own interest in writing systems. When a symbol is described as a “character,” I believe it. Since I was young, letters seemed to assume distinct personalities.

Of course, there can be lines without much personality at all, that aren’t writing and that lack feeling. My printmaking instructor challenged me to move beyond my first pieces, which I had called “squiggles,” implying a purposelessness worse than “scribbles.” To go forward, I needed to work to put meaning into the lines. For a while I experimented with almost-text, or “asemic writing,” which is the art term for something that looks like writing but isn’t. (Or, as I like to think of it, maybe it was once readable, or is readable by someone not you.) Aesthetically, I was fond of these pieces, but I felt as if I was making pretty backgrounds to support the enigmatic asemic writing. How could I keep the line-work from overshadowing the emotion I had designed it to express?

I had an epiphany.

For the entire class, I had assumed that I was interested in lines because they remind me of writing systems (case in point: this blog). As it turns out, it’s the other way around. I’ve become interested in writing systems because I relate to the line. This explained why I was having trouble expressing myself. I don’t conceive of myself as writing, but as line. A line’s bends and angles and overlaps and clusters have an emotional and visceral implication for me.

I don’t mean this abstractly. I think the brain has a topological sense of the figure it’s attached to: the limbs and digits, and where each of these connects. A standing stick figure is instantly recognizable as human. Many human motions are most easily conceived of as a shift in the skeletal posture, and after all, a skeleton is in many ways an assemblage of lines.

While I believe we all have this line-sense of ourselves, I think for me it is my primary sense of physical being. When I see people with a lot of muscle or a lot of fat, I can’t immediately comprehend how they can associate it with their body. Sure it’s covered by skin, which usually defines the body’s outer boundary, but do they truly feel it to be a part of them? I realized that people must have all variety of muscle-senses, fat-senses, mind-senses, bone-senses, hair-senses, and digestive-senses of their bodies that might be the most prominent. Presumably, in a healthy person, these senses would balance and accord more or less with the actualities of human anatomy. But who among us has achieved perfect concord between the body and mind?

Instead of paper stencils or carved wood, I began to use string to make my designs. Inking the string inevitably caused it to clump up and stick to itself. Though this annoyed me at first, I found that these patterns resonated with me, the dense areas connected by a thin strand where I had pulled a clump apart. I started knotting the string into human figures—a clump for the head, the torso, each limb, and the groin—which became disfigured in in the process of inking. Joints were lost; unnatural ones appeared... Lines, which I felt my body was composed of, tortured into a crude semblance of body. The line, how we manifest thought as word, clotted and distended. A body of line, failing in its attempt to assume mass. The line-figures represented a state of being both physical and mental. A gesture wholly alive, and dying.

Visual art, because it has no concrete interpretation, has always unnerved me. Besides there being no set interpretation, there are also no set guidelines for reaching an interpretation. I'm not saying that you have to make art to understand it, and I'm definitely not saying that I understand art now. I will say that imagining a piece of artwork as a body like but unlike your own—and giving in to the psychological and physical sensations of that imagination—is one way of understanding. After manipulating line, I have a much deeper awareness of my physical self my unease at occupying a place in the world. Perhaps I can use this knowledge to move beyond my line-sense, into multiple dimensions, into a more kaleidoscopic experience of inhabiting space.