I’ve recently acquired (via Inter-Library Loan!  Woo-hoo!!!) a collection of writings exhibited below:

which opens with an essay by anthropologist Tim Ingold who starts it off with a remarkable movement through slugs and storms, lines-earth-eather, Kandinsky, Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and others – investigating them through a concept of “meshwork.”

“By this I mean an entanglement of interwoven lines.  These lines may loop or twist around one another or weave in and out.  Crucially, however, they do not connect.  This is what distinguishes the meshwork from the network.  The lines of the network are connectors, each given as the relation between two points, independently and in advance of any movement from one toward the other…the lines of a meshwork, by contrast, are of movement or growth.  They are temporal ‘lines of becoming’…Life is a proliferation of loose ends.  It can only be carried on in a world that is not fully joined up.  Thus the very continuity of life – its sustainability, in current jargon – depends on the fact that nothing ever quite fits..”

-Tim Ingold, “Lines and the Eather”-

Journeying on from there through Deleuze and Guattari, mood and weather, meteorology and aesthetics he arrives at a conception of flesh as both meshwork (exhalation) and atmosphere (inhalation) – a whole-being experience of relation enabling and realizing animate life….

I’ve now been browsing numerous writings by Ingold, fascinated by the semiotic/anthropologico/ontological /scientific meshwork his production encompasses… Thankfully, he makes much of his work available full and free to us… if you’re interested – I risk the promise it will be worth your while…

Lines: A brief history by Tim Ingold

Being Alive by Tim Ingold

and a fascinating working paper as introduction:  Realities: Bringing Things to Life