Nature is serpentine, a bed of tangled vines, creepers and crawlers, probing dumb fingers of fetid organic life.[Paglia]
And the vine is supple growth. And the grid is rigid stability.
A trellis is all stillness, and a climbing plant is motion. And the organic has great tensile strength. And the mineral’s strength is compressive.
The vine wheels, searching for towers, like a radar scanning. It gropes blindly, with a simple algorithm to identify surrogate spines. Nastic, non-directional nutation, searching out structure to climb up. Thigmotropic grasp-response, the touch of helix tendrils.
Scrolls in the old iron gate. Scrolls in the book’s printed corners. The boundaried grate does animate. Texts are a spiraling growing.
The wrought-iron vine is form-frozen, a deadmetal abstraction. Partial mimicry of vegetal form. But the wrought-iron signifies life, by providing a structure, for the climbing from roots.
Simple cybernetic phototropism can climb a trellis, and we are that sunseeker, and we are the builders of trellis.
MoMA, New York, 2023: An-My Lê’s “Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières” retrospective with Anteros. Struck-still by a simple black & white photograph of thick underbrush, concealing a gridded, cubic, bamboo cage. Reminds me of another lifetime, another land across the Atlantic. I’m drifting off, I’m drifting off in time...
Parthenon, New York, 2017: The author wanders through statuary, listening to Newsom’s “Kingfisher”. Suddenly struck by the casting mold of a man, standing upright, hands spread perhaps to throw a javelin. (He is seamed down the groin.) The cast is held upright by a timber scaffold, which encloses him like a prison, and also holds him upright.
The cast provides the molten metal a form, and also prevents it taking other forms. Enablement and disablement are revealed to be flipsides of a coin. Every hard concrete fact obstructs some possible flow, but also enables other, specific, more complex flowings. Each of our freedoms is also constraint.
The basic grid-forms:
The sign of the plus +, standing for addition, combination, and the intersection of streets, and rivers, the sites of forums and fairs.
The X, or asterisk, standing for multiplication, tabled rows and columns, the charted variable kept blank.
The T of post-and-lintel architecture, compressive strength, crossbeam and crossbow, pier and stanchion and girder.
The sign of the cross † and crucifix, flesh formed to the shape of the grid, killing the flesh.
Complex grid-forms:
The ladder, tool of ascent and elevation, so as to reach God & Heavens; oft to be discarded, as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
The trellis, which like the ladder allows a vine’s ascent.
The portcullis or grated-gate, which throttles and controls entry and exit through a boundary.
The prison bars of a jailhouse, confining and constraining, yet allowing the passage of light, sound, and perhaps food; the motif is echoed in inmate striped pajamas. Grilles and grates often serve a similar function of semi-permeability, as in a window screen.
The fishnet, a pliable lattice of great tensile strength, which traps organic life for harvest; and compare the spiderweb.
The network, which relays vibrational signals from node to node through its system of links or bridges. (The spiderweb functions as such a network, of not just trapping but transmitting the location of a trapped fly.)
The bridge, an elevated pilon-supported plane, often supported by tensile suspension, crossing over a chasm and connecting two separated realms.
The crosshair and the compass rose, strategies of world-quartering and spatial orientation, as the Roman groma did.
The railroad, a regularized landscape allowing smooth travel over great distances.
The ribcage, a regularized, calcified support structure serving to protect soft internal organs.
What we come to see is that the grid serves to constrain as well as to enable; to trap as well as liberate; to connect as well as separate. “[My grandmother] said my favorite game when I was a kid was to turn my old crib upside down and pretend I was in jail.”[Bill Callahan]
The grid is a form of technology, a system of generics. Non-fungible individuals are made fungible via their positioning in a system of logically manipulable coordinates. Subjective, local, & relational spatial regimes are replaced by objective, global, and allocentric systems of reference—a tactic of simplification employed by hierarchical & centralized control structures.
(And yet how useful—that we might find any, previously unknown town or river on a map, simply by looking up its coordinates, tracing our fingers down Column H and across Row 7 to their intersection.)
Some of the earliest human artifacts, grids painstaking etched into stone: in Ohio, in Britain, tens of thousands of years, predating all other forms.
And this is written to you forty thousand years later from the Worldwide “Web,” the “Net,” la Red: Something you travel across; something you’re caught in. Your plane (piano) of reality. The mesh of culture. Which always enables by disabling, affords through constraint. Jimmy Joyce: “When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
National Grid, electric grid, plumbing and sewage, flushing to the sea. Mesh of fiber-optics, landlines, trans-Atlantic cables. Matrix of streets, tunnels, city blocks.
Grids in the ruled notebook. Grids in the sequencer. Grids in the topological models. Grids in the game-engine. Grids in the scaffolded tower. Grids in the pixelated screen. All this rectangle vision.
A tension of contrasts choreographs organic response. Vines use both the positive and negative space of the trellis to grow; it is the rhythmic repetition of presence and absence which make the trellis habitable. In the same way, the white space on the page allows the black ink to mean: The difference is growing.
Grid in the meter, grid in the musical bar, grid in metronome. Music-making has succumbed to this impulse to simplified orders, losing its organic sense of time to tiled, copy-pasted four-bar passages, Logic Pro’s press-Q-to-quantize, the snap-to-grid of AutoTune and pitch-correcting software.
The grid breaks a continuous space into discrete units, converts the analogue into digital. The world becomes a keyboard. (Handwriting remains freefluid, feathered, & flying—but do we use its affordance?)
The gridded ship-mast stands, a laddered tower, with its turret-nest at top, and from its rigid form is slung with the sail-cloth and rope of tensing strength. “As different as mist and mast,” writes Nabokov—meaning, maybe, mistress and master. But meaning also, surely, that joint image, of a ship in fog, enclouded nebulosity. The Romantic wandered of the unknown. And a grid a that attempt at patterned structure, in a world shrouded. Taming the wild…
If the ladder is an archetypal form of structure, which allows us ascent, à la Babel, then the snake is an archetypal form of fluid and organic complexity, lurking hidden in the tallgrass, responsible for our toppling Fall.