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Sometimes, especially when I’m tired, looking into my newborn’s eyes feels like interspecies communication, underwater even. I often think about Z as a liquid creature. Recently, I suppose, she was.
The ocean is full of cetacean vocalization and clicking. Z will have no words for almost a year to come. While I’m nursing around the clock and recovering from surgery in the summer heat I’ve been reading a lot to M (4) who has to sit next to me instead of on my sutured lap. We learn about the waggle dance bees use to communicate with the hive about the direction and distance of a rich flower feast. • “Remember the seed-germ,” Louis Sullivan wrote in A System of Architectural Ornament. This reminder is centered under a diagram on Plate 2, and appears again on Plate 5. “Remember the seed-germ.” In Kindergarten Chats, when Sullivan wrote about his wish to harness the creative potential of nature, or “man’s instinct for reproduction,” meaning art-making, he did, specifically, mean men. In his writing, “nature” is coded as femme. The seed pod is kind of like a house full of energy, or maybe it’s more of a reproductive organ. It’s an object of desire. Spit out the pit. It’s compost. This autumn the transitional kindergarten class talked about litter and now Z (4) knows that everything ends up in the ocean. In the footnotes of a children’s book about the Atlantic, M (8) read about Panthalassa, the great global ocean before Pangaea split apart. When peaches are the school fruit snack my children save the pits and bring them home. Do the teachers think we are planting an orchard? Behind my childhood home in Chicago lived two peach trees from Georgia, planted as grafted seedlings by the previous occupants. Nearby stands a small storefront with a terracotta façade designed by Louis Sullivan. A pale green jewel box, it is covered with sinuous lines, psychedelic seed pods and radiating near-fractal floral motifs. “Ornament” comes from the Latin “ornare,” which means both to equip and to adorn or embellish. Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” in 1975. In an illustrated essay that year, he cites Jean Perrin, a French physicist who seventy years earlier wrote a philosophical treatise on geometry. ”Many phenomena,” Perrin wrote, “may be represented by regular continuous functions, somewhat in the same way that a sheet of tinfoil may be wrapped round a sponge without following accurately the latter’s complicated contour.” Euclidian geometry, which we learn in grammar school, is satisfying precisely because it smooths things out, ignoring irregularities. This is useful and often necessary, but leaves out the bulk, makes assumptions, “corrects” imperfections. Some phenomena—lightning, lava, inkblots, sea sponges—cannot be even approximately described with Euclidian tools. Fractals are self-similar and incorporate chance. They can be curves, areas, surfaces, curdles. Some are described as dusts. Fractal geometry, with its scaling, recursive nature, helps us describe and envision infinity. Sweep after breakfast, sweep after lunch, sweep after snack, sweep after dinner. Keep the rhythm going and it’s like a heartbeat. • |