Ingold, Tim. _The Life of Lines_. Routledge, 2015, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781317539346. [[../writing/Bibliography]] “what happens when people or things cling to one another? There is an entwining of lines. They must bind in some such way that the tension that would tear them apart actually holds them fast. Nothing can hold on unless it puts out a line, and unless that line can tangle with others. When everything tangles with everything else, the result is what I call a meshwork.1 To describe the meshwork is to start from the premise that every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines. This book, at once sociological and ecological in scope and ambition, is a study of the life of lines.” – Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. ^3761be > “Blobs have volume, mass, density: they give us materials. Lines have none of these. What they have, which blobs do not, is torsion, flexion and vivacity. They give us life. Life began when lines began to emerge and to escape the monopoly of blobs. Where the blob attests to the principle of territorialisation, the line bears out the contrary principle of deterritorialisation” > > - Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “The linking of hands, palm to palm and with fingers bent to form a hook, does not here symbolise a togetherness that is attained by other means. Rather, hands are the means of togetherness. That is, they are the instruments of sociality, which can function in the way they do precisely because of their capacity – quite literally – to interdigitate.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. #### Octopuses and anemones “In a famous passage in the Rules, Durkheim argued that a plurality of individual minds, or ‘consciousnesses’, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for social life. In addition, these minds must be combined, but in a certain way. What, then, is this way? How must minds be combined if they are to produce social life? Durkheim’s answer was that ‘by aggregating together, by interpenetrating, by fusing together, individuals give birth to a being, psychical if you will, but one which constitutes a psychical individuality of a new kind’. In a footnote he added that for this reason it is necessary to speak of a ‘collective consciousness’ as distinct from ‘individual consciousnesses’.” ==internet== as psychical being Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. ### “Materials, gesture, sense and sentiment” “knotting is about how contrary forces of tension and friction, as in pulling tight, are generative of new forms. And it is about how forms are held in place within such a force-field or, in short, about ‘making things stick’.“Accordingly, our focus should be on forces and materials rather than form and content. Knotting, then, registers in a number of domains of thought and practice by which patterns of culture are sustained and bound into the interstices of human life. These include: the flows and growth patterns of materials, including air, water, cordage and wood; bodily movement and gesture, as in weaving and sewing; sensory perception, especially touch and hearing, perhaps more than (but certainly not to the exclusion of) vision; and human relationships and the sentiment that infuses them.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “the critical aspect is that the knot is tied. Tying always involves the formation of a loop, through which the tip of the line is then threaded and tightened. The choreography of looping…Topologically, the human heart (in Latin, cor) is a tube in the form of a knot, as is the French horn (also cor).” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “There has long been a close association, especially in seafaring communities, between knots and the wind. To untie a knot is to let loose the wind. One knot releases a light breeze, the second a moderate one. Untie the third, however, and all hell will break loose.6 Tying and untying, then, lie at the core of the relation between the hearth and the wind, or, more broadly, between society and cosmos.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. ### Surface “We live in a world turned outside in – what I shall call an inverted world – in which all that moves and grows, shines or burns, or makes a noise has been reconstructed within as a simulacrum or image of the exterior.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “We treat the landscape as a view, and imagine that we see the world in pictures, optically projected into our minds as upon the white walls of the interior room. In this picture-landscape there is no weather: the wind does not blow, nor does rain ever fall. Clouds are forever arrested in their growth. Nowhere do fires burn; there is no smoke. We talk about the sun as a celestial body, not as an explosion of light. We even suppose that when we go outside, the sounds we hear will be recorded, and call it ‘soundscape’.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “We do not live inside our bodies, but – in breathing and eating – continually and alternately gather the world into ourselves and release ourselves into the world.” ^be014d Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. ### Wind-walking “lines come in two principal kinds: traces and threads. Traces are formed on surfaces; threads are strung through the air. My argument was that these two manifestations of line are readily inter-convertible. In the formation of surfaces, threads are converted into traces; in their dissolution, traces are converted into threads.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “breathing in and out also resembles the gesture of tying the knot, already described in Chapter 4. Here too, the sweeping, circular movement that retrieves the line creates an opening through which it can then pass. In a world without objects, the breath is a kind of aerial knot, tied by the organism in the turbulent wind, binding it to others” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. “taking a line for a breather.” (talking about air) “it is precisely because of the transparency of this life-sustaining medium that we can see. Moreover, in its vibrations, air transmits sound waves, so that we can hear, and in the freedom of movement it affords, it allows us to touch…All perception, then, depends upon it.” Excerpt From: Ingold, Tim. “The Life of Lines.” Apple Books. ”