Alexander’s knot

        (Epiphanies found through movement. IV.)

No, not the sword-swinging, horse-riding conqueror,
who, infamously impatient of rigorous thought,
prompted Euclid to warn him that
“there are no royal roads to mathematics”.

Not even the mathematician Alexander,
who quantified the unchangeable, immovable constancies of a knot,
which, no matter the frustrated pulling against the rope,
—Gordian or otherwise—
in the knot of which
one could not an alteration find,
more constant, therefore, than even love,
    thus showing the Greater Alexander
    how he was doomed from the start not to rule the world.

Imagine instead a dancer Alexander —or, perhaps, an Alexandra—
who is themselves a knot,
momentarily on a welcoming floor that is host to other bodies,
knots all of them,
not because they are unchanging empretzelments of muscle and sinew,
but because they are gatherings of meaning
    first to oneself,
        the endless nervature of tiny knots coming together
        to make thought & courage,
    and then to one another,
        knots of queries, answering & resolving themselves in touch & movement,
    knots, not of frustration, but revelation,
        about the universes each of us become,
    even knots of actual muscle sometimes, easing themselves into grace,
    knots that are
        unknots
        to one another’s daily fears about a world
        knotted beyond human decency,
    knots of subversion,
        where basic kindness has become subversion.
A knot then
    not to take a sword to,
    nor to compute a polynomial out of,
    but to witness & change with.
A knot of meaning.

Melih Sener