.....I WALK THE LINE.....

.....On the outskirts of our small town in the Bearn in South West France there are a couple of roadside crosses ; these are of no specific religious significance other than the fact that they mark a line - a very important line in its day............and this got me thinking about lines..................

I suppose my starting point for the drawn line was seeing Saul Steinberg's The Line for the first time , reproduced recently in the Observer newspaper............taking a line for a walk............

Lines seem to have been an important part of my life , from a love of Ordnance Survey maps and the exercise of having to describe a landscape through the interpretation of contour lines , through my initial training as a prospective architect and onwards into a fulfilling career as an interior designer , spending at least half my time at a drawing board - and as a designer a line takes on its own existence . I draw a line 100mm long and it exists as a 100mm line - but if I then WRITE alongside it ' 1: 50 ' the same line now represents 5000mm . From this I can then construct room layouts, plans, elevations all in drawn form , and
eventually enough information to construct an entire building...........hhmmm. Powerful stuff.

Ok , now lets increase the scale , maybe up to ' 1:50,000 '...........and now I can even map continents. And
continental maps are fascinating. Lets look at a couple..........................

The US of A...........a map familiar to all , this one showing state boundaries. The boundaries of the earliest settled colonies in the north east would seem to follow logical geophysical outlines  - ie be determined by existing physical conditions and a result of land surveys . Predetermined by a reflection of what is existing - and to a large extent this holds up to the line of the Mississippi / Missouri . West of the Mississippi something

else happens altogether - the  state lines are mostly now square lines gridded out , mostly right-angled corners , pretty much none of then reflecting underlying physical conditions . In other words , the map divisions now come first , set out on a table / drawing board / whatever , and then transposed onto the rel-time landscape out there . One a response to territorial conditions , one an imposed construct.

This may well be an over simplification - but lets now look at a map of Australia................

.........and apart from the Victoria / New South Wales border , everything here is gridded up ; straight lines , right-angles , an exercise that looks as if it took no more than five minutes on a drawing board - no relationship to underlying physical conditions. So these lines now represent political boundaries , predetermined and then imposed onto the terrain . The power of the line . An initial response to existing reality now becomes a discipline to which reality is subjugated .

And so , back to the road side crosses in the Bearn . The crosses do indeed represent a line - the lines indicating the political division of France following the Armistice in 1940 , the line dividing Occupied France and Vichy France passing along the edge of our town. A line indicating a political reality , transposed onto the terrain and commemorated via the crosses.

,

 A political line , but a line that had undoubted significance in its day and still resonates in the memory of the town and its inhabitants...........and once identified on paper , marked with a cross on the ground.