I have contemplated several other titles for this post, including ‘Straight Lines are a myth’, but myths generally have a stronger claim to truth than straight lines do. I hope I can explain.
I have posited this for a little while now, being, perhaps, motivated to do so by the fact that I can never draw a perfectly straight line. Indeed I’m sure many of us find it hard to do so, but we all know those arty-designy kids at school who managed it, somehow, without a ruler. Being not of that esteemed class, perhaps I am looking for justification for my weakness; but in doing so, I think I happen upon the truth.
I have posited this as I have been reading The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, and have been contemplating the differences between the way the world is presented to us from the left hemisphere of the brain versus the right hemisphere; and, living in a world as we do that is arguably to a great degree a by-product of the left hemisphere – our post-industrialist West being full of straight lines – nature is seen as a place to retreat to in order to refresh our souls, instead of simply the place we inhabit most naturally, being creatures of it. How curious. But when we do retreat there, we observe that there are no truly straight lines observable in nature. Apparently straight lines, yes, but never perfectly.
McGilchrist comes to this in his book – and so I was delighted to find my thesis confirmed by eminent scholars – as, in his discussion of the Industrial Revolution, he cites Leonard Shlain and Delacroix:
‘Delacroix wrote that “it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains”; as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends.’ (TMAHE, p.387)
But even at the horizon, which may appear to be a straight line, well, I think by now we all know that it isn’t, really. As I have written elsewhere, everything in the universe tends towards the circular, and the spherical – perhaps, possibly, because the universe is spherical, or that everything in the universe has an orbit around a centre – which isn’t you, by the way.
It is worth quoting further from the end notes accompanying the above citation in The Master and His Emissary:
‘Arnhem also quotes Delacroix as writing…that straight lines “never occur in nature… Where men do employ them, the elements gnaw away at them”.’ (Ibid., p.509)
And for the nay-sayers who might want to try to pick a bone with the contention that straight lines do not occur in nature:
‘It has been pointed out that at the microscopic level there are straight lines in crystals: but even there they exist only over very short distances; and all depends on the level at which one chooses to inspect them (in other words, the straightest line in nature is as jagged as a coastline, if viewed sufficiently accurately).’ (Ibid.)
What is the upshot of all this? Am I to throw away my rulers and take down the guttering from the front of my house because it follows a straight line? Of course not; the straight line in that instance provides a useful function, dependent, as it is, on gravity – a centrifugal force, it must be pointed out, one which pulls objects towards an orbital centre (everything is spherical). But the straight line helps the water to flow in a predictable pattern in this case; to avoid water pooling and stagnating. Although, as every home owner knows, this doesn’t eliminate the potential problems that might be attendant upon guttering, and the elements will do as Delacroix wrote, gnawing away at it.
It is the hard edges in life that we create that we also often then bump up against, being soft, changeable creatures, not composed of any straight lines. We must beware lest we make our world too rigid, too structured, binding ourselves to a shape that we ourselves do not fit. We must be prepared to make our world more adaptable; to return to nature for inspiration around form, for it is from nature that we have sprung.
One final word: this is why I have such a fight with my office chair. Why am I made to sit on a straight line? Why are our children, at school? No wonder they have a hard time concentrating. All chairs should adopt a hammock design – a piece of material slung between the arms or poles of a frame, into which our round, squishy bodies may comfortably fit however we like.
