When, like me, you become old, and can look back on a life of material success and disease-free, fertile, extreme promiscuity, your thoughts will turn naturally to recording the narrative of your life to illuminate the lives of your many descendants. Perhaps you’ll begin by looking through the beautiful, grinning faces in your photograph albums, developing a list of your most memorable and fecund lovers, and setting to the research of the throbbing web of sexual liaison from which you yourself condensed, and into which your mighty seed was sown.

You’ll find that you have two biological parents; several grandparents; 8 or so great-grandparents; somewhere in the region of 16 great-great-grandparents… and so on beyond that. Your genome contains material from all your forebears; and the DNA of each of your children contains a proportion of your own… which will be diluted as the bloodline proceeds, until your great-great-grandchildren carry just a hint, just a whiff of your essence.

Genes, whatever they are, are spun together or drift apart in the gene stream of hereditary time.

Similarly with ideas: I think in a way that has been spun together from my great-grandfather’s methodism, my maternal grandmother’s fatalism and sense of humour, my paternal grandfather’s socialism, my mum’s musicality, my dad’s love of science… and we inevitably pass our ideas and values on to our friends and the generations that follow us.

It’s the same story with the materials that constitute your body: ingredients from all over the world, perhaps too widely and freely sourced, are spun together into dishes of food, then unspun in my gut and re-spun into the proteins, fats, and other components of my body’s cells. When I shed, breathe, sweat, piss or shit them out again, they disperse, to be spun into other nodes of the food network.

Years ago we visited India and watched coir matting being spun from coconut fibres (here’s a video I found on Youtube – I didn’t shoot it) and I remember thinking that the spinning demonstrated something deep. As the spinners work, they seem to present fibres to the end of the thread; the fibres are caught and drawn into the thread – almost like they’re jumping – and become part of the thread. Later, as you scuff your feet on your coir mat, fibres are pulled out of the thread and disperse.

In many ways, life – Life, even, with a capital “L” – is the spinning together of fats and proteins, patterns of base pair molecules in DNA, bloodlines, ideas, traditions. And so are planets, solar systems: accretion discs, a dynamic spinning-together (and spinning apart) of gas, dust and rock. It’s the same with social groups: I heard some management-speak about teams a while ago, describing them as “forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.” During the noisy breakup of a music collective with which I was involved a while ago, my friend Andy told me that all social groups have a natural lifespan. Conversations, arguments, the spinning together of ideas, emotions, into a thread of relationships.

If you imagine the fate of any social group, any piece of food, any multicellular organism; any commercial product, any heavenly body; that fate is to be spun together from its components, then to hold itself together for a while, and in the end to unravel.

It’s literally all about string.

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