… Perhaps all magical objects are knottings together of objects and the subjects that conjure with them.
This is from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). Today’s paraphernalia (my choice) are Cards and Knots:
… There seem to be certain kinds of objects whose mission is to embody the powers of flatness, which we may identify as the tabulating power of abstracting and reshuffling the world. Such objects are always characterised by the duality of being objects that bring the world together into one place even as they are also objects in the world. They are outside the world which is also outside them. The most powerful, and the most widely disseminated, of the objects which undergo this oscillation is the card. Let us say that cards are the apotheosis of the flat, and the tabulating power that it gives.
The card has been at the centre of the automatic processes that govern the modern world. …
[ ... ]
… We are often told that the distinguishing feature of the human hand is its opposable thumb, and more specifically the fact that the thumb and index finger can be pressed together, enabling all kinds of actions from turning screws to the flipping of coins and the stitching of lace. The two dimensions of depth and length of the card both seem to figure this opposable relation. Held between finger and thumb, the thinness of the card is a minimal membrane, an all-but-nothing, that seems to be nothing but the difference between front and back, recto and verso. Held by its edges, the card suddenly reveals its spring and resistance, its unsuspected kinetic energy and coiled violence.
… Playing cards are … magical partly because they are meaningless in themselves; their power only comes from the signs they carry, and the meaning of those signs in relation to other signs. The meaning of the playing card is in part its arbitrariness, its flatness, its lack of intrinsic life or meaning, the fact that no card means anything on its own. Its flatness signifies this dry semioticity. Its life comes from contingency and adjacency, from what occurs when it is laid next to another card.
On to Knots:
… A knot is the magical image of time turned upon itself. There is an important difference between a knot and a loop, bow or circle. For these latter merely mark or suspend time, open up a nook or epoch in time, a passage of time in which time can appear not to pass. But a knot does more than merely remit the onward pressure of time, for it also turns it against or back into itself. A loop slackens the tension of ongoing time, but a knot makes that tension strive against itself, so that, the more one pulls on the two sides of a knot, the tighter it gets, time coagulating into space and space becoming ever more charged with time.
… The knot concentrates a power of unloosing, disperses a power of retention. The knot is a figure for the logical difficulty of paradox not because it simply makes the paradoxical relation plain or lays it open to view, but because it is itself paradoxical and self-confuting. A knot is a figure that offers to help us grasp all at once the idea of something that can neither quite be pulled apart or pull itself together. It is implicated in what it signifies.
The knot is the image of life itself, with man as the anastomosis of spirit and body, in which, as in John Donne’s ’The Ecstasy,’ is ‘knit / That knot, which makes us man.’* The dissolution of death is the untying of that knot.
… In a sense, the power of the knot is precisely that it images the empty self-relation of that which comes into being in turning or reflecting on itself, and is thus twin to the self-conjuring cogito. A knot is not so much a magical object in itself, as a magical form, or the precipitate of a magical practice. It is a way of doing magic with, and imparting magical possibility to, more mundane objects — laces, ribbons, hankies, wires and hair. Indeed, the definition of a magical object I offered earlier, as something that helps us credit our own powers to invest objects with magical powers, has something characteristically involuted and knotty about it. Perhaps all magical objects are knottings together of objects and the subjects that conjure with them.
[*Donne's lines are actually "Because such fingers need to knit / That subtle knot which makes us man,"]
My most recent previous post from Connor’s book is here.
-Julie
