"In that epitome of modern bureaucracy, the dotted line, the same principle taken to its logical extreme. Upon this line that is not a line the movement of life is collapsed into a series of instants. Lifeless and inert, it neither moves nor speaks. It has no personality whatsoever. It is, if you will, the perfect negation of the signature that comes to stand above it. Unlike the wayfarer who signs his presence on the land in the ever-growing sum of his trails, and the scribe who signs his presence on the page in his ever-extending letter-line, the modern author signs his work with the trace of a gesture so truncated and condensed, and so deeply sedimented in motor memory, that he carries it within him wherever he goes as a mark of his unique and unchanging identity. It is, as the graphologist H. J. Jacoby put it, his 'psychological visiting card' ... To sign on the dotted line is not to lay a trail but to execute a mark on the things to be found and appropriated at successive sites of occupation ... Nothing better illustrates the opposition, central to the modern constitution, between individual idiosyncrasy and the determination of the social order." (Ingold, Lines, 'Up, across and along', p 94)

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Thinking about the Latin word ductus (the visible and invisible traces of the hand in movement during writing) and its relation to the English word conduct.

Thinking, too, of the teacher as conductor: i) the accompanying person on the journey (e.g. on the bus or tram); ii) the orchestral director - both interpreter (of the composition) and facilitator of the performance (co-ordinating the many instruments); iii) the person who moves through the text, who weaves the reading; iv) the channeler of energy (e.g. lightning), who earths and who transmits (the Tradition).

"the conduct of a thinking mind on its way through a composition" (cited by Ingold, p 16)

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Tidying the upstairs office. As ever therapeutic. & the benefits - immediate.

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