A line is a collection of points extending infinitely in both directions.
A point has no dimensions.
I can describe where I was sitting when my 3rd grade math teacher, the great Dr. Johnny Hill, explained this to our bewildered class at McGuffey school in Oxford Ohio. The table, the blackboard, the inset door off to the right.
I remember the smile on his face as he saw the expressions on ours. Even if you squished another point in between two points or took one out there would still be an infinite number of points. And the line would keep going. For infinity. And two points that aren’t overlapping make a unique line. And that unique line can be named and measured, even if the distance between is infinitesimal.
Been thinking a lot about lines and spaces and volumes this week. This is a new development, and uncomfortable, in a good way. Until now I only thought in words or in a two-dimensional way, as in, a drawing, a photograph as a translation from that confusion of three-dimensional life, a film projected on a wall.
Here in this residency there has been a lot more focus on sculpture, sculptors, and non-horizontal space. Some of my change in physical orientation to the vertical axis also comes as a result of finally getting a better handle on what it is I am doing with this balloon and stratospheric investigation.
Last week I watched an incredible YouTube video of Nasa’s hydrogen balloon launch from the Esrange Space Center this July. As an older person, YouTube is not my automatic go-to when trying to envision things that have happened. Rather, I tend to look at archives of static images and let my imagination throw out the ballast.
“I have been working in this industry for decades and never witnessed a more beautiful balloon launch. There were no winds to talk about, a clear blue sky and happy cheering from all the scientists as the balloon left for the sky.” (link)
The video was extraordinary. It’s almost six hours long. The launch starts at the five hour mark. The whole video is shot from a fixed camera position like a Warhol film, midsummer middle-of-the-night Arctic light, pine trees all around, the empty plastic filling in what seems to be extreme slow motion, but in reality is simply a measure of how much hydrogen has to get forced into the plastic in order to lift it and its experimental cargo.
No humans are present, though there is a machine adjacent to the balloon that may be manned. You can’t see from the control-tower camera angle. The video is silent. The pines surround the launch site and display no emotion. The balloon begins to rise. It might as well be a jellyfish. We are underwater and the silent pines are sand at the ocean’s depths.
With all the control and order to bring the balloon and its cargo into being, the wonder is in the gentle, unstructured floating. As it approaches the stratosphere, the hydrogen inside will expand the balloon to a massive size. That’s why it looks so helpless as it, with invisible effort, pulls itself and its cargo out of frame.
I feel the tug on the string as I let my balloon go from the front porch after a day of school at McGuffey elementary, where I’ve learned about points on a line. My cargo a note with my address on it, pleading for a letter back from whoever might find the burst remnants, a unique line that can’t get to infinity.
Another line I’ve been mulling while here in Spain is the line of undifferentiated vocalization that makes up a language. For my own perverse reasons I have decided to pretend I understand Spanish and am trying to speak it too.
In certain places where I do speak the language, I feel my ears work to tune a radio dial to a new frequency. Then comprehension comes in loud and clear. It’s the best feeling; misunderstandings are mere static and as time passes, I am able to tweak the dial closer and closer to a clear transmission. The tension of the tuning is the pleasure of the experience.
I am reminded of some Saussure I thought I understood many years ago and attempted to teach my students at one point. Oh god, you’re thinking, is she going to try to talk Saussure to me now? No. I am just going to show you a diagram from Saussure with a few words by him that are useful to me as an artist and person in the world.
I was too messed up by feeling stupid at college while reading this stuff to ever try to impose it on you. My sense is, like artists, philosophers, historians, and anyone else, really, is that Saussure was simply trying to explain his ideas in the most clear way he could. It’s only later that the explanations get tangled and by extension, intimidating.
“Against the floating realm of thought, would sounds by themselves yield predelimited entities? No more so than ideas. Phonic substance is neither more fixed nor more rigid than thought; it is not a mold into which thought must of necessity fit but a plastic substance divided in turn into distinct parts to furnish the signifiers needed by thought.”
So he shows and tells us that signs are arbitrary, that thoughts do not correspond to sounds and sounds don’t create thoughts, there is no inherent relationship between a slice of sound and a slice of thought. What I like is that, like Bergson (who I have written about before and will not bore you with here), Saussure too reaches for metaphors to explain himself again and again. Air in contact with a sheet of water. Thought and sound as two sides of a blank sheet of paper, or this strange body/river drawing that I like best.
The illustration reminds me of the radio dial in the ancient and overheated Chrysler with blue vinyl seats of my childhood. The dial that resisted small finger and thumb-pressure but grudgingly acceded as I got bigger. The reluctant dial dragged away from its left-sided classical spot to the right-hand local indie station. In between, static and squawks and twangs of indefinable noise sprouted from the car’s tinny speakers.
Those incomprehensible sounds, the in-betweens, those may as well be the artworks we try to make over the course of our lives as we try to make something concrete from the arbitrary relationships between our thoughts and our lived experience.
Despite its dizzying infinity, maybe art is a way we can create a unique line, just one point, and another. They don’t overlap. They connect. A measure of something, no matter how brief.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. If you’re super into Saussure, here you go. But then if you are super into Saussure, you’ve probably already read it.
P.P.S. If you prefer to read the beautiful blog post describing the July balloon launch at Esrange, you can access that here.
thank you so much for this, mon dieu we needed it today. I want to watch that launch, while I remember linguistics classes across the decades. Just 🌟 so glad you’re sharing these pieces