Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

Next time you cross a bridge over a fast-flowing river, look down at the water as it streams past one of the bridge’s feet. You might see the current split into a liquid ravine, water streaming either side, sending out eddies one way and the other. There’s a name for this pattern: vortex street. Smoke does it, as do clouds, and if you’re canoeing and hold your paddle still in the river you’ll see water flow around it that way, too. In a vortex street you see linear flows, spirals, even foam: so many patterns, mesmerizing. These days I’m seeing this pattern in life. Moving forward in time as I naturally do even as my mind goes elsewhere, cycles of thought spin from me this way and that, the same cycles even if sometimes they spin one way, sometimes the other. I’m stopped almost short by small explosions of excitement or anger, then feel a change of mind, a change of mind again—around and around yet catching the stream and flowing quickly onward before another spin. As though worded thought, fantasy, memory, sensation all flow through and yet around some invisible but solid me.