In previous posts I wrote about the way in which I have “re-interpreted” an East Asian belief regarding the “Red String of Fate”. It is time to revisit the idea and to write a bit more – expanding the original thoughts and considering just what we are “tied” to.
The legend talks about the the fact that people are joined by a red string – which can stretch, tangle, bend – but never break – to others who are destined to be part of their life path – destined to meet one another in a certain situation or to help one another in some way. The most specific versions suggest that they are destined to become lovers.
I wrote a certain amount about this idea in The Red Thread and followed that up by describing how we ourselves exert pressure on those threads in Pulling Those Threads Tight.
The specific purpose of this post is to explore a thought that it is not just people that we are tied to. Rather, the red strings anchor us to all sorts of things which continue to exert some sort of influence long after you might have expected them to drop out of your life.
The word anchor is, perhaps, the wrong one as there are very few things that are “fixed” in the sense that we associate with being anchored – for some connections we are indeed like a tethered balloon, but for most the other end is as free to move as we are ourselves. In that respect they act very much like the tethers we have to other people.
The sort of thing that we end up being tethered to will also vary from person to person. As I look at my own links I find lots of things that are not at all surprising – and just a few that are certainly not what I might have predicted.
It is no surprise I guess that there are pieces of music that are closely tied into my life – more than I could possibly count – some bring back memories of specific events – like Beethoven’s Egmont overture and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; some remind me of people – like Rossini’s overture to La Gazza Ladra which connects me to a certain Bass Trombone player who – despite having imbibed too much alcohol prior to the concert managed to put in the solos perfectly – although that was probably all he played…; some are forever associated with a very specific life event – how many people must connect a piece of music with getting married.
I am also tied to places – places where I spent holidays – places where I studied – and certainly places where I lived and worked. Here we are clearly seeing that the “red string” is very associated with the memories that I was talking about in more recent posts.
In some ways we could equate a memory with a string – however – the legend goes a bit further – the strings connect us to our future as well as our present and our past – so they cannot all be memories.
LIke the strings attaching us to people – the strings attaching us to “things” are of varying strength – the pull of some is much greater than the pull of others. There are some places in the world that I would love to return to, there are others that – having been once and experienced it – that is plenty.
The death of Terry Pratchett last week reminds me of another – and far more strange – type of red string. We are connected to places (and people) that do not really exist through books, TV and films. Terry Pratchett created a whole world – Discworld – and populated it with a huge cast of ‘people’ (those who know that books will know why that is in quotes) – many of whom you come to know and love as you progress through the history of this fictional place.
Many other writers have done the same – Tolkien – Douglas Adams – Neal Stephenson – Isaac Asimov – Frank Herbert – to name just a few among my own experience – they have all created worlds that are ‘apart’, but which in some sort of weird way I am now tied into – sometimes it is difficult to separate the reality from the fiction. (and that is a feature of the books of some authors – for instance Jostein Gaarder). Every work of fiction creates its own world – the writers I singled out have, in one way or another, created worlds that are both different and the same as our own.
Some people get hooked (that might be a really apposite term) by the soap operas on the TV, some by the activities of their favourite sports team – others, less wisely, by drugs, alcohol or worse.
The common thread (!!) is that the ties are hard to cut. That applies whether the tie is to something real or something imaginary; whether it is to something savoury or something sour; something good or something evil.
Part of the attraction of the red string legend is that both ends of the string are being pulled – maybe at different times – by those who are tied together in that way – and due to the tangles/knots they are also being pulled by other strings. How much “pull” has something that is ‘intangible’? If a piece of music keeps reminding me of a particular time/place/person – how much is that the music “pulling me” or is it simply that the string between the people has been looped round the thing that has a shared meaning?
In Pulling Those Threads Tight I signed off with “This will surely be expanded upon in a future post” (itself a sort of red string!!) – I feel that needs to be repeated here.