A Bight No-bight Situation

 An Observational Open Thread

bight(n.)

Old English byht "bend, angle, corner," from Proto-Germanic *buhtiz (source also of Middle Low German bucht, German Bucht, Dutch bocht, Danish bught "bight, bay"), from PIE root *bheug- "to bend," with derivatives referring to bent, pliable, or curved objects. The sense of "long, narrow indentation on a coastline" is from late 15c. In Middle English it also was used in reference to the body, of the fork of the legs or the hollow of an armpit.

 

                Not a bite, or a byte, but a bight.

                The subject came up because we were winding a ball of yarn off of the skein. It took a while, so I was thinking about the nature of things, and stuff. I recognized that what we were dealing with was a whole lot of bights.

                Being around boat guys and ropes for many years, I knew the word to mean “not the end of the rope”, but the middle. Not the business end, ahem. But I didn’t know how it was spelled.

                Upon being informed, I looked it up. Ah. Suddenly it occurred to me that my favorite sedative, knitting, is just a tremendous number of bights. It’s all loops within loops, with various contortions.

                So much of human culture depends on what is done with a line, a string, a yarn, a rope. It’s quite basic. I like to imagine what came first, and what it was for.

                A bight is not the beginning, nor the ending, it’s the middle, the very very long middle. A good picture of “now.”  Now is when everything happens or is done.

                Enough of that! As it happens, as I learned up there in the quote, it can refer to a crenellated coastline. In that regard, I offer this poem, which is quite nice. 

 

The Bight

By Elizabeth Bishop, 1949

 

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,

the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash

into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,

it seems to me, like pickaxes,

rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

and going off with humorous elbowings.

Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

on impalpable drafts

and open their tails like scissors on the curves

or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in

with the obliging air of retrievers,

bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks

and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock

where, glinting like little plowshares,

the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry

for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,

like torn-open, unanswered letters.

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.

🤍

    The title up there refers to an old joke about sharks and biting. With sharks, it's one way or the other. Spelled differently though.