There Are No More Straight Lines Here
In Defence of Meandering
"To find your way, you must lose it."
- Yoruba proverb
Every morning, Maiandros the god-son of the ancient Titans, Oceanus and Tethys, wipes his bleeding brow and stretches his feet to ready himself for his long dance across southwestern Turkey to the Aegean.
For 615 kilometres, every day, Maiandros winds and dips and curves and whirls and bends with serpentine ferocity, spilling past the gawping admiration of Herodotus, Homer, and Strabo…The dancing of Maiandros is so infectious that Strabo once wrote: “its course is so exceedingly winding that everything winding is called meandering.” He was of course writing about a river – a river ancient, contemporary, and promissory – now known by the name, Büyük Menderes.
And yes, it is true: our English word meander is etymologically indebted to the dance of this riverine Titan-son...
“We speak as if meandering were a deviation from a truer path. But the river knows no other way. To ‘correct’ its curves is to erase its identity.”
Description
Description
“We speak as if meandering were a deviation from a truer path. But the river knows no other way. To ‘correct’ its curves is to erase its identity.”
Description
Description
“We speak as if meandering were a deviation from a truer path. But the river knows no other way. To ‘correct’ its curves is to erase its identity.”
Returning to Place
A meander cannot be “put back” any more than a story can be un-told. What was, is folded into what is, and what is becoming refuses to be extracted from that braid. To defend meandering is not to defend inaction; on the contrary, it is to defend the ‘right’ of rivers, of people, of histories, to remain excessive to our diagrams.
It is with this sense of excess that, I think, Maiandros bequeaths another gift to our exhausted landscapes, our exhausted, bomb-strewn, orange-weathered, days of the fire this time. This time, not just the word ‘meander’, but a cosmopoetics of living amidst the storm. Of hosting the curve. Of dwelling within the agonistic roil and toil of a universe that resists straight lines....
Read the full article in Meander Magazine Volume One: Returning to Place
