Knotty Business: A Delightfully Tangled Reading List on Knots

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Scribes and surgeons, thieves and theologians, philosophers and pallbearers. Here’s what they all have—patron saints. Knotmakers have no saints. There is, however, Our Lady Undoer of Knots—Mary, serenely unkinking a long ribbon while stomping on a knotted serpent. Here’s St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century Christian theologian: “The knot of disobedience of the first woman, Eve, was undone by the obedience of Mary; the knot the virgin Eve had created was undone by the Virgin Mary through her faith.” 

Might the tying and the untying be parts of the same whole? A couple thousand years earlier in ancient Egypt, the goddess Isis seemed to be saying so—the one who weaves it is also the one who unweaves the 𓎬 tyet.  The knot itself is endless. Da Vinci knew that, as did Dürer. Not Alexander, though.

I’ve been skimming The Ashley Book of Knots, a charmingly eccentric 1944 volume by sailor and artist Clifford W. Ashley. “I hobnobbed with butchers and steeple jacks, cobblers and truck drivers, electric linesmen, Boy Scouts, and with elderly ladies who knit.” A massive “adventure in unlimited space” with 7,000 illustrations, it is spoken of with near-religious fervor by knotmakers. “In Boston I halted an operation to see how the surgeon made fast his stitches. I have watched oxen slung for the shoeing, I have helped throw pack lashings, I have followed tree surgeons through their acrobatics and examined poachers’ traps and snares. But I never saw Houdini,” Ashley goes on to confess. 

This public domain copy has no cover, and so I’ve downloaded the original cover image by George Giguere. Against an opalescent sky and an algal sea, an old, weathered sailor sits on a cask with a (mandatory) pipe clenched in his (mandatory) square jaw. He’s showing us the Tom Fool knot, also known as the conjuror’s knot. Now that’s an old knot. Heraklas, the Greek physician, called this knot epankylotos brokhos—the interlooped noose—in his list of surgical nooses and knots in the first century AD. Our sailor looks pleased he knows his history.

Philippe Petit, legendary highwire artist and star of the Oscar-winning Man on Wire says, “If at first you don’t succeed, tie, tie again.” A card-carrying member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, the man does know a thing or two about knotsmanship. An ill-made knot on the wire could mean he may not go home that day.

My own stakes are much lower. I’m just learning how to make knots. I’ve got heavy-knit cotton cords in ivory and crimson that I keep in a pouch. Using two colors helps me tell the twists and turns apart. I’ve also got an app called Grog Knots made by Alan Grogono—anesthesiologist, sailor, and curious knotter. (“Alan planned a career as an engineer or a comedian but father wisely interceded on the basis that a medical career would allow both. He was right!”) 

I should be starting with the basics but I’m constantly distracted by more glamorous knots with names like Turk’s Head or Monkey’s Fist. Or Windy Chien’s Dune Creature, a Heaving Line sandworm that reminds me of the exploding palm leaf snakes I made as a kid. I’ll keep at it. Just like in writing, I enjoy working with shape and form, gesture and constraint. As Nick Cave says in The Red Hand Files, “What it takes for me to pursue these freedoms—to feel genuinely free—has paradoxically something to do with order and constraint. . . . Freedom finds itself in captivity.” And someday I’ll get good at this wonderful thing.

In Praise of the Humble Knot (Jody Rosen, The New York Times, September 2014)

“Mankind, before the Stone Age, was really a String Age,” says Des Pawson—researcher, historian, and master knotsmith. Before we learned to make fire, before we rolled the first wheel, before we polished the first axe, we learned how to make knots. Knots are ancient human technology—stops, ties, binds, holds, weaves. Ashley calls the knot, beautifully, “a complication in cordage.” An intentional complication, that is. It’s knots we turn to when we want to find luck, profess undying love, symbolize marriage, make epic art, and if all else fails, resort to witchery. Knottery is likely to be with us to the, uh, bitter end. Rosen pays sweet tribute to the art.

One section of the museum is a shed that used to be a stockroom. Today it showcases rope-making tools and equipment: knives and mallets; iron marlin spikes and fids; vices and dollies; wooden paddles and heaving boards for tightening knots; stakeheads, used for separating strands of yarn, that once lined vast ropewalks. Next door is the largest of the sheds. It’s still a tiny space, less than 200 square feet, but it is a treasure box: packed from floor to ceiling with more rope and wood and metal than the eye can take in.

There are tiny “monkey’s fist” key rings and five-foot-long ship’s fenders, woven from Manila rope and hemp and rattan. In glass display cases there are “beckets,” thickly threaded handles for sea chests and sea bags. There are candlesticks and chalices made of intricately knotted cotton seine twine, and sailors mats fashioned from sisal and colored yarn, stitched in elegant geometric patterns. A net for collecting cockles, which Pawson found in nearby North Norfolk, has a Shaker-like beauty and simplicity: a slender wooden handle made of hedgerow elm, hung with a multicolored rope netting.

The Man Who Invented Fifteen Hundred Necktie Knots (Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker, November 2023)

Boris Mocka is the doorman in Hutson’s apartment building. He is also the world’s first “tieknotologist,” credited with creating the largest collection of original tie knots in the world. The Four-in-hand and the Half Windsor are for ordinary mortals; Mocka’s designs bear names like The Desiderata, The Ganesha, The Anubis, and The Jawbreaker (his personal favorite). A high bar is called for, after all, if you claim artistic descendancy from the Terracotta Warriors: “210 BC: China’s first emperor, Qin Shih Huang, was buried with his terracotta ‘army.’ Each statue wore a wrapped neck cloth, this is the earliest known predecessor of the modern tie.”

“I’m not a mathematician,” Mocka said. “I’m actually here to find out if I’m delusional.” He laughed, and then started to explain some of the techniques in his book.

Some of Mocka’s moves, Vejdemo-Johansson said, added geometric complexity without making a knot topologically different. Others added extra crossings. Either way, Vejdemo-Johansson went on, math hadn’t captured them yet. Mocka had effectively invented a new dialect, and its grammar was even more complex than the ones that professional mathematicians were using.

“You and I are operating in exactly opposite directions,” Vejdemo-Johansson told Mocka. “My goal is to pick a box and understand it. Your goal is to pick a box and transcend it.”

The Inca’s Knotty History (Gary Urton and Manuel Medrano, Sapiens, July 2018)

At first glance, it looks like a colorful ornament made out of knotted strings, a big headdress or a necklace, perhaps, or a shaggy little curtain of unknown use. This is the khipu, invented over 500 years ago by the Inca empire in Peru, and secretly, one of the most astonishing tools ever devised to store and convey information—mathematical, historical, linguistic, narrative, or several at the same time. The word khipu means “knot” in Kichwa (Quechua). Cotton or camelid fleece cords were dyed in different colors, knotted, and suspended from a horizontal main cord. The colors, the presence or absence of knots, the distance between the knots, and the type of knots—single, long, or figure-eight—all encoded meaning.  

Modern humans have been studying them for over a hundred years, but in the absence of a “Rosetta khipu,” they remain undeciphered. Medrano was a graduate student at Harvard when he made the initial breakthrough. This deeply interesting research prompts us to ask—in what other ways might we be ignorant about other ways of thinking? 

We are trained from an early age that mathematics and language are two discrete worlds. The Incas, however, collapsed them into a three-dimensional construct—an achievement of civilizational complexity in the form of narrative cords.

This complexity makes it surprising that the Incas are often remembered for what they lacked, when compared with our modern society. South America is the only continent (besides Antarctica) on which no civilization invented a system of graphical writing for more than 10,000 years after the first people arrived. We are yet to confirm a pre-conquest event knotted in contemporaneous records. The Incas have even earned a spot on the list of original “pristine” civilizations—commonly identified as Egypt, Shang China, Mesopotamia, the Mayas and the Incas—despite being the only nation that never invented the wheel, markets, or writing.

The danger in this view is judging the past through the lens of the present. 

A Binding Light (Anton Desyatnikov, Aeon, December 2012)

Every year, Annals of Improbable Research, “research that makes people laugh… then think,” gives out the Ig Nobel Prizes. The 2008 Physics award was “for proving [mathematically] that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.” Yeah, but look at NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars using the oldest space technology (and see the guild nerding out on the knots). All this to say that what appears at first to be silly, or obvious, or at the other extreme, wildly improbable might just open the door to real knowledge. Take light, for example, as Desyatnikov does in this curious essay. “A strange union,” he says, “this marriage of light and knots.”

Light was among the first preoccupations of modern physics. For Isaac Newton, it came between his early innovations in pure mathematics and his work on the motion of solid bodies, suggestively falling between the realm of thought and the realm of things. In its radiance and regularity, advancing in straight lines to destroy darkness and reveal the world as it really was, it was an irresistible metaphor for reason itself: hence ‘enlightenment’. Even now, our language of understanding is almost entirely composed of light imagery. An implication might be clear, a process transparent, an idea bright. Light seems inseparable from understanding.

Yet our understanding of light itself is far from complete. The last century’s debate on duality — light as both particle and wave at the same time — is by now well-covered. In the meantime, science has gone further, to the nano scale, smaller than the length of the light wave itself, to reveal its finest structure. When light is bright enough, it doesn’t just show things as they are: it changes them. And it can be remarkably knotty. That isn’t a metaphor. It literally ties itself into knots.

Untangling Why Knots Are Important (Steven Strogatz, Colin Adams, Lisa Piccirillo, Quanta, April 2022)

Once it was believed that all space was pervaded by an invisible substance called luminiferous (light-bearing) ether. One day in 1867, Lord Kelvin, a mathematical physicist and engineer, was watching Peter Guthrie Tait, a fellow mathematical physicist, blow some smoke rings with his machine. Kelvin (the absolute temperature scale is named after him) thought, why, that’s lovely, what if elements were simply vortices or knots made of ether. His space jelly vortex theory didn’t pan out, but Tait got really into tabulating knots, and the very mathematical, very visual field of topology was born. 

Knot theory has far-reaching implications in theoretical physics, quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and more (Kelvin might be having a laugh, after all). In this interview (available as a podcast with a transcript), The Joy of Why host Strogatz talks to fellow mathematicians Adams and Piccirillo, giving us a smooth introduction to the world of knots in mathematics. Remember to think of all objects in this world as rubbery.

Adams: It’s one of the great advantages of being in this field [topology] in mathematics is, you know, usually, if you sit next to somebody on a plane, and they say, “What do you do?” and you’re a mathematician, you’re going to have a very hard time explaining to them what you do. But I have this huge advantage that I can take my shoelace, and I can take it off my shoe, and I can pull it up, and I can say, okay, I can tie a knot in this shoelace, and then glue the two loose ends together, and then I can try to study that object and decide is it really knotted — as you were describing, Steve — is it really knotted? Or is it not? Could you disentangle it without cutting it open?

And it turns out, this is a very hard problem. 

Tying Knots (Ken Liu, Clarkesworld, January 2011)

If you’re still here, here’s your sweet reward—a whole short story about knots old and new. Liu is a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy-winning speculative fiction author and translator of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. He invented a very specific aesthetic he calls “silkpunk”—“a technology aesthetic based on a science fictional elaboration of traditions of engineering in East Asia’s classical antiquity.” The result is an utterly pleasing, well, braid of the past and the future. In this story, a scientist confronted with protein-folding problems takes a “discovery trip” to a mountain village and stumbles, “eyes wider than teacups,” upon ancient knot-writing. But is he the protagonist? No spoilers.

The Nan do not write. We knot.

Knots have allowed us to keep alive the wisdom and voices of our ancestors. A long hemp rope, supple and elastic, is stretched and twisted to give it the right amount of tension and coil. Thirty-one different kinds of knots can be made on the rope, corresponding to the shapes of the lips and the tongue in making different syllables. Strung together like Buddhist prayer beads, the knots form words, sentences, stories. Speech is given substance and form. Run the hand down the string, and you can feel the knotters’ thoughts in your fingers and hear their voices through your bones.

The knotted string does not stay straight. The knots put tension on the rope. It coils in on itself, twisting, bending, yearning towards a shape. A book of knots is not a straight line, but more like a compact statue. Different knots give you different shapes in the coiled-up rope, and at a glance you can see the flow and contour of the argument, the tangible rise and fall of rhythm and rhyme.

Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands