Allegory - Drawing the line

Allegory - Drawing the lineECF

#essay, #line, #cyrcle, #rhizome

‘As an act, drawing a line is inexact and violent’. (Johnson 106).

Let’s take Johnny Cash’ famous song I walk the line, written in 1975. A straight line is the shortest path between two points (A and B). Walking implies a displacement from A to B. When Johnny walks the line, he’s performing an oriented operation. This makes ‘the line’ a vector.

Now, let’s take June Carter and Merle Kilgore’s Ring of fire, written a few years later. A ring most commonly refers to a hollow circular shape. When drawing a circle, any starting point (A) and ending point (B) are necessarily identical. You cannot walk a circle without arriving at exactly the same point you departed from. June ‘falls into a ring of fire’, so she is trapped inside a closed curve from which not only she cannot get out, but also where the border gets further and further from her reach as she falls.

An allegory is a literary resource in which the characters and/or plot of a story, poem, play or picture represent particular qualities or ideas that relate to morals, religion, or politics. In an allegory (at least) two

stories cohabit the same literary space; a story understood literally within its own plot and sense, and an interpretation of the same, which is mediated by signs. Allegories swarm in popular culture. Perhaps because both songs are about romantic love, the most hackneyed literary topic for western commonplaces, or because they are rich in geometrical symbolism, the popular anthems happen to be fertile for allegorical readings.

A simple interpretation of the first shows a man devoted to his new love, to whom he promises fidelity. For that he watches himself closely, avoiding desire and temptation along his lonely way: ‘I keep a close watch on this heart of mine—I keep my eyes wide open all the time.’ With these words, the man subdues himself to the catholic holy sacrament of marriage, represented by the line. ‘Because you’re mine, I walk the line.’

A similar analysis of the second song shows a woman captive of her own desire. But her love, unlike the one above, isn’t blessed by the holy sacrament. For she sins, falling hopelessly and without regret ‘into a burning ring of fire’. The more she loves the deeper she falls into the burning loop: ‘I went down, down, down and the flames went higher - And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire.’

Both songs are circular tales: They depict an ongoing action (a penitence for love) based on it’s own repetition, a common thing in folk songs. In essence, their plot is simple and the allegory behind it comes easy for all audiences. Perhaps that is the reason for their popularity.

But something changes when we take both lyrics together. This is only possible because it was Johnny Cash who finally interpreted Ring of Fire, making it one of his greatest hits, after having left his first wife (to whom he had initially devoted his love) to marry June Carter (who had also left his former husband in the process) in 1966. June’s ring got in the way of Jonny’s line, or—not to blame Eve— Johnny’s line collided with June’s ring.

Luckily enough, the two figures happened to coexist in the same plane, making it possible to superimpose them. So, when the steady line intersects the cyclic prison, their trajectories modify each other,

generating with their ensemble movement a third figure. In maths, this reciprocal dance is called a convolution. The figure resulting from this beautiful operation is no other than a spiral; the very same curve that, embossed onto the surface of a vinyl, captures sound. But, how could a line grasp the whole complexity of a song?

In an Euclidean system, where coordinates are taken for granted and the system can only be observed from within, drawing lines is establishing differences, judging, and taking parts. Drawing a line is performing a violent act of choice. But lines are also gateways into complexity. It is precisely from the convoluted iteration of a line that a fractal is created. Like a dendrite, like Chinese cabbage, like fluvial networks, like a cyclone, like a galaxy, like Fibonacci’s Sequence, like the Principle of Chaos.

In a way, it is possible to say that allegories are also convolutional operations. They couldn’t exist without an interpretative reading, superimposed onto a literal one, creating with their bonding a richer story. As structuralists pointed out, signs are complex ‘assemblages’ of signified and signifier, referring the first to the plane of content (the concept ‘behind’) and the second to the plane of expression, among which myths proliferate. Later on, deconstructivists extended this analysis, establishing the principle of ‘difference’, according to which it is impossible to identify signified and signifier, since language, especially ideal concepts such as truth and justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible to determine. A critical reading of allegories requires being able to recognize and interpret signs. And, most importantly, it requires us to acknowledge that the layers of meaning that constitute them aren’t fixed.

Allegories are entangled within the narrative(s) of history(s) as much as fractals are in nature. Very often it is not possible to tell the end of ‘reality’ from the beginning of the ‘myth’. Skepticism has proven to be a useful tool for navigating this uncertainty, but the risk of falling into the fractal loop of indeterminism is big, and might lead to disillusionment and inaction.

Back to our plot, when analyzing the story as a whole, it seems that Johnny crossed the ‘deadly chiasmus’ set up by the Christian status quo, to fall right into June’s ring of fire. Just as it happened to Billy Bud, the common plot of the characters contains its own marring. When crossing the chiasmus, the tension ends, and each individual’s fate seems to accommodate the other’s, denying both songs in its own accomplishment.

If the listener had known from the beginning how the events would unfold maybe they wouldn’t have believed in Johnny Cash’s and June Carter’s love songs. But we don’t want to know how Jonny deviates from his steady line, and we don’t want to know how June’s ring of fire languishes to ashes. Perhaps we just like them precisely because they offer a still frame of a story whose ending we deny knowing.

‘Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edge”’ (Melville)