I often dig to the roots of words, as though down there I’ll learn both origin and truth. Comfort seeps in when I find a word’s ancient seed, and then see how far it’s grown or scattered. Now, thinking of patterns, I open the Oxford English Dictionary, look up pattern, and am surprised to see that it was a doublet of patron and thus born of pater: father. It seems odd that pattern, with its whiff of wallpaper and McCall’s, is kin to patronize. But a word’s history and an OED entry can be long. And looking an inch below patron, I reach matrix, an archaic sense of pattern. From mater: mother. This note in the entry follows a cross, which is the grave marker of obsolete definitions, but I like knowing that pattern evolved through both female and male.
The textile scholar Charlotte Jirousek tells me what pattern is now: “an underlying structure that organizes surfaces or structures in a consistent, regular manner. Pattern can be described as a repeating unit of shape or form, but it can also be thought of as the ‘skeleton’ that organizes the parts of a composition” (Art, Design, and Visual Thinking). Now I want to look at patterns underlying narrative, especially those “darlings of nature,” as Peter Stevens calls them in Patterns of Nature, to see how they can structure novels and stories.