Knots (2003)

A knot, in Knot Theory, is defined as a closed 3-Dimensional curve that does not intersect itself. To conjure the image of the simplest knot (the unknot or the trivial knot) imagine an aerial view of a doughnut or a hula-hoop.

Without the idea of ether, Knot Theory would never have been necessary. Ether was the Mcguffin substance that bound the invisible world to the visible. For Lord Kelvin, in the 19th Century, atoms were knots in the fabric of the ether and every element was a different configuration of those knots.

Without Knot Theory, my cousin Terry, an evangelical minister, wouldn’t be able to use a Borromean knot (three unknots linked together like Olympic rings) to explain the Holy Trinity, and Lacan could not have used the same knot to illustrate the interconnectedness of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. Knots make pictures of invisible things- the serpent is always coiled inside the Möbius strip; the image and the projection of the image are always nibbling at each other’s tails.

My Great Aunt Betty, who at the age of ninety-one table taps in the Spiritualist Church in Stoke on Trent, still believes in ether and is used to seeing strands of ectoplasm curl out of it and she still hears the voices from Beyond threading through it. The idea of ether still holds some currency in the popular imagination as a space in which vague notions; uncanny intuitions and creepy premonitions take form.

Aristotle imagined ether to be the substance that allowed the sun’s rays to travel through changeless space and Lord Kelvin imagined electromagnetic waves curving effortlessly through it.

Ether’s biggest service, over the years, has been to cover a terrifying void. Ether accounted for the philosophical and scientific impossibility of ‘emptiness’. And if ether accounted for the problem of emptiness it also accounted for the visible and palpable interruptions to that emptiness – matter itself – atoms were knots in the ether. Thus it would have been possible to make a scheme of knots, similar to the periodic table that would catalogue each element as a type of knot – a knotty lexicon of the nature of the universe. In 1897 Michelson-Morley’s experiment refuted the existence of ether and the table was never compiled. If it had been it would now be as real as Australia, as true as the 1914-18 war, as right as two and two equals four.

After Michelson-Morley’s experiment all the ghosts were locked on the Other Side and the knots couldn’t tie themselves to objects anymore. But we still need pictures to show us invisible things. Pictures that weave a visible veil over the invisible. Pictures of things that are too small to see or which resonate at a frequency our eye can’t detect: DNA strands like multicoloured mains wire, unknotting, unpacking, replicating and unknotting again…

 Steve Rushton