Sitting at my desk in Vermont very early one recent morning, I found myself staring at the mountain instead of the email I was supposed to be writing. Shadowy morning light reflected on ‘Hayride’– the broad, satiny white-ribbon trail most prominently centered on the view from my window. Suddenly, I saw four black specs, easily recognizable as skiers, swinging and swaying down the middle of the trail. ‘Wie di ameisen’ (like ants) my father would have said. The short, descriptive phrase a legacy from his German governess; the passion for skiing his to me.
But I was mesmerized by those graceful ants. I couldn’t stop watching their heavenly run down the mountain, even knowing exactly what it felt like, looked like and even sounded like to be up there doing what they did. Then I realized what I’d been waiting for. Skiing in tandem but far apart, thanks to the freedom of the pristine first-run snow, their skis left evidence of the dance streaming out behind. I’d been watching for the beloved ‘S’ turn carvings in the powder. The beauty of those ‘S’s would still be there after the ‘ants’ were long gone. Sure enough those cosmically connected ‘S’ curves swayed their way down the trail as far as I could see, with no way now of telling how they’d started or where they led. I watched them until the light changed and more ‘ants’ arrived to blur the snow fields and skiers’ marks.
Why have I always loved ‘S’s so much? Could it have to do with my own name? My first, maiden and married names all begin with that letter, assigning me to the end of any alphabetical list no matter how you twist it. That’s never bothered me. I’m an ‘S’ through and through, and proud of it. Is that just because it’s the hook I hang my ego on; some kind of protection against insecurity? I don’t think so.
My early childhood nickname was Cindy until I could pronounce the ‘S’ followed by a vowel and hard consonant of Sidney properly. And although I knew nothing but that ‘C’ in those early years, it never felt like me. There was always something disconnected about it; something striving but unattained; something immature and unfinished; an unrealized potential. Like the “me” I didn’t want to be when I was little, ‘C’ didn’t seem to live up to its promise. Oh I know it’s just a shaped line with so many other ways of looking at it, and I’m not casting aspersions on any of the ‘C’ people I know and love; but C’s gaping, naked opening that seems to yearn to be met to complete a circle, was representative of a lot of things I wanted to let go of in childhood. My grandmother’s suggestion that it was time to take my given name with ‘S’ back to replace the ‘C’, was one of the happiest moments of my early life.
What is it about ‘S’ that makes me love it so? Why do I think it’s so special if it’s not just about me? I obviously haven’t been secure enough in the past to assume a Sidney by any other name would be the same. Yet there’s always been something fundamentally important about ‘S’. It took a lecture I went to this week at the New York Society Library, an institutional friend of inestimable value to writers of all kinds, to remind me of the significance of ‘S’. There’s every good reason to conduct a life-long love affair with it.
The lovely, humorous, skillful and generous Molly Peacock, poet extraordinaire and recent biographer of an 18th century female artist, spoke on the fascinating elements of late-life creativity. At one point in my furious note-taking I was stopped dead by her reference to her subject’s exposure to the teachings of William Hogarth. Molly moved quite quickly past his theory that the curved line of an ‘S’ represents ‘The Line of Beauty’ in art, but I remembered that shape demonstrated in paintings from my favorite History of Art courses long ago.
‘The Line of Beauty’ is a term used to describe an S-shaped curve within an object. This idea originated with Hogarth who was an 18th century English painter, satirist, and writer, and is part of his theory of Aesthetics as described in his ‘Analysis of Beauty’(1753). The S-Shaped curved lines were meant to signify liveliness and energy, as contrasted with straight lines, parallel lines, or right-angled intersecting lines which supposedly represent stasis, death, or inanimate objects. Whew! That puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Now I know why I felt so sorry for the ‘H’s and ‘A’s I knew as a child and so attracted to ‘S’. The letters combining straight and curved lines, (P’s, D’s and B’s, for example) have always been an enigma to me, the combination of curves and lines demonstrating an ambiguity I’m both attracted to and fearful of. I know, you can overdo this analogy, but it’s the “waving-lines” of the ‘S’, as Hogarth termed them, that are unique to our alphabet and satisfy in a way no others can. Sounds like a love affair to me. I haven’t thought about Hogarth for fifty years, but the immediacy of his truth nestled immediately back in my chest where it used to live.
So that’s why I love that beautiful ‘S’ so much. It seems endless and mysteriously original at the same time. It doesn’t take over, but is supremely suggestive of possibilities. And there I go again, anthropomorphizing a wavy line with the flow of a life. How could one not? If art imitates life then surely life also imitates art. Where is that ‘S’ curve coming from or going to? Who knows? Anywhere; and what a creative way that is to live.