Lines of Control and the stifling rules of conformism

After an informal introduction to a sense of the outside, a child first meets the severity of boundaries when they begin to draw or write. The words solidify into an internalised chorus, kept active through the remainder of one’s life by varying iterations – ‘Don’t colour outside the line’. The line is stern, it demands obedience and loyalty – pen and paint are naturally indisciplined, a manifestation, as they are, of a mind that refuses home and harbour. The teacher’s eyes are our first encounter with the border patrol police – we must stay inside, as if everything outside the lines is scary, rough weather and penalising landscape.

The child learns to see their face soon after, to recognise it as art, as a drawing book with printed lines and arcs, inside which they must deposit colour. The eyes can only be outlined, like dots which the child has been taught to connect, to create a line, a lineage, to produce meaning. The lips, their outlines already existent, must be filled in. From the face, which they learn to draw as an assemblage of arcs and circles inside circles – the sternness of the straight line left only for the nose, so that there is a natural recognition of the ego in its shape, much before the idiomatic versions of ‘high-nosed’ that exist in all linguistic cultures – the consciousness of lines moves to the body. And there is shock – like paint that spills outside the lines and disorients our conditioned awareness of shapes and figures, bathwater falls off the margins of our bodies. We wipe off the paint outside the lines but have had to relinquish control over the bathwater and its afterlife, its new habitats.

Then the games begin – ‘You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in, and shake it all about…’ A repetition with the left foot follows, and, with it, the body’s displacement through the iterations of ‘in’ and ‘out’. The child’s foot points towards the centre of the imaginary circle, to whose inside it has been conditioned to belong. There’s also hopscotch and its variations – one must stay inside the temporary assemblage of rhombuses. One must, in spite of challenges posed by the rules of the game and the limitations of one’s body and its fraught relationship with the world, limp and jump on one foot and cover the distance from one square to another, but never – NEVER – come out of these lines. To fall, to falter, to fail to remain within the lines would mean death, the end of one’s chances in the game. That, we’re never allowed to forget, is one of the oldest metaphors of life, the contingencies of life.

Bats and balls, racquets and shuttlecocks follow the stones and chalk and soil marks of kit-kit-kit-kit. The ball must drop once inside the line before it can be allowed the legal permission to go outside – ‘out’ shouts the adjudicator, the tennis umpire, when it does. Players on a kabaddi team gather and wrestle with the player from the opposing side to keep them from returning to their home – this is the infiltrator who must, with combined force, be punished for having stepped out of line. Ten players in another game fight with ten others to kick a ball inside four lines – being able to do so seems like the equivalent of finding god, for it’s almost the same sound: ‘Goal’, god as another similar-sounding monosyllable, to be found only inside the lines, or at the intersection of two straight lines meeting each other, as on the cross.

All of these are manifestations of the phrase that now defines our world, even supplying the title of movies: LoC, Line of Control. But it is to the outside that we want to reach, for such is the natural charm of centrifugality. That is why the stadium erupts when a batter hits a ball outside the line and circle – the overreaching is the ‘overboundary’. In a game so predicated on staying within lines – the ball must land between lines, the bat must touch the line for the batter to stay alive, where stumps and bails are lines – this is necessary relief, as, say, the Porter scene is in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

After such conditioning in staying within the lines, when one is suddenly asked by corporate managers to think ‘out of the box’, an unexpected kind of passive-aggressive inertia takes over. The modular life of staying within lines has damaged the muscles that abet curiosity, playfulness and the freedom of infinite self-amendment. Anything outside the lines now sounds stertorous. That is perhaps why Edvard Munch’s 1895 lithograph version of The Scream shows a human, hands on their ears, trapped between lines.