I’ve heard it said that when it comes down to it, when all else fails, a sturdy knife is the thing to have. Personally though, I’d rather have some string. Granted a knife is nice to have, but it can only do one thing, and that is cut. But with a string one can make a fire, catch a fish, snare an animal, make and mend clothes, bind a wound. Strings harness the abilities of things and make them greater than the sum of their parts.
At its core, all string does is hold things together, but isn’t that enough? In fact, isn’t that all that we as humans can strive to do? Strive to make connections between things, tie together thoughts to form ideas, bind our ideas to our hands, our hands to objects, our hearts to other hearts, and our minds to other minds. Strings of sorts tie the fabric of time and space, all things that were, are, and will be, together inextricably and eternally. String is the purest physical expression of all things.
What a close and elemental world early man lived in. Nothing to protect him from the elements other than a small earthen shelter and animal pelts, nothing to distance himself from the tusks and ripping claws of beasts, save the strength of his throwing arm. How mighty he must have felt, the first Stone Age man to use string. At his grasp he had created a force multiplier, a reach extender, a tool with the power to save, create, or kill. With a simple idea, he had unwittingly expanded his world a thousandfold, had taken the first step towards impersonality, with a device that binds together.
Like soft clay, an idle piece of fiber is useless until it is molded to its purpose. String transforms things to fit another purpose. David’s sling, simple string attached to a pouch that lodged a pebble, made his arm a bolt of lightning with which he smote the Philistine Goliath. String transforms a supple staff into a twanging coiled beast, whose sharpened shafts darkened the sky at Thermopylae, and killed Achilles from a Trojan tower, and bested the French at Agincourt. String makes the gallows into an unrelenting python.
String is a great conqueror. Woven into billowing sails, guided by rope, man bested the seas and the wind, dealing distance−the bane of man’s progress−another blow. Woven parachutes and climbers’ harnesses conquered heights. Great steel ropes hung bridges that spanned the rivers, stitching them up like wounds. Railroads tied cities together, sewing up states to form a patchwork quilt, conquering continents. Telegraph cables and phone lines brought together these continents to form the globe. These strings, lines, ropes, and cables that once worked to expand the world of man, are now making it smaller.
Strings explain. What is the purpose of stories, of memories? What is the work of historians, teachers, politicians, actors, scientist or philosophers? All of these seek to connect things, to clarify by weaving together ideas, tying together events, lessons, narratives, to bind experience to perception. Science will likely soon prove to us that all matter in the universe is but strings of energy, vibrating according to the direction of the fabric of at least ten dimensions. We will then, in discovering and understanding the nature of the universe, truly be tied to it and to everything that ever was and will be−unified by a single string.