string. in its most basic sense, what is it? like rope, yarn, and thread: a long fiber. string connects. string vibrates. string flows, attaches, knots, blows away. string lights are abundant in the wintertime and teen bedrooms; strings of music and chatter float over the wind from an open restaurant by the waves at night. strings of light, strings of numbers, strings of text. clothes strung on a clothesline, themselves made of string. a string of consciousness, string of ideas. one word leads to another. one thing leads to another; a string of events. a string of molecules: ribonucleic acid. double it and we get DNA, which encodes our very existence.
let’s go back to strings of ideas; that seems interesting. so a string of ideas is a set of ideas that are connected by a common thread. thinking along these lines reminds me of ‘stream of consciousness,’ which brings to mind the difference between stream of consciousness and a string of ideas. in the former, ideas are connected to adjacent ones but the whole doesn’t necessarily have a uniting idea, while a string of ideas should have one, I think. so a string of ideas must be more organized, then, and essay-like. although maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive, either.
stream of consciousness can circle back around and connect to itself, and it usually does revolve around or return to a single topic (at least in my experience). and while we might argue that a string of ideas should be more deliberately placed, like beads on a bracelet, sometimes the beads just slide on by themselves, without much interference of decision making. anyways, I find that my best writing happens when I get so lost in a string of ideas that they string themselves… but it isn’t always like that, either.
going back to string- it binds books, ties things together. again, the theme of attachment. you can trip over a line of string; string can also divide. anyhow, I don’t know if this really went anywhere but it’s been twenty minutes, nice to thought dump with you.
extras: spiderwebs, food webs, strings that overlap create webs. interwoven chaos that’s connected and everything has an affect on another thing. time is connected, we are connected through time? consequences of actions?
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Superstring theory has revolutionized speculation about the physical world by suggesting that strings play a pivotal role in the universe. Strings, however, always have explained or enriched our lives, from Theseus’s escape route from the Labyrinth, to kittens playing with balls of yarn, to the single hair that held the sword above Damocles, to the Old Norse tradition that one’s life is a thread woven into a tapestry of fate, to the beautiful sounds of the finely tuned string of a violin, to the children’s game of cat’s cradle, to the concept of stringing someone along. Use the power of string to explain the biggest or the smallest phenomenon.
—Inspired by Adam Sobolweski