[Image: a Menger sponge overgrown with vines, found here. Wikipedia explains how
to construct a real Menger sponge, noting — without elaboration — that the resulting
object “simultaneously exhibits an infinite surface area and encloses zero volume.”*]
From whiskey river:
You know when you see something like a marvelous mountain against the blue sky, the vivid, bright, clear, unpolluted snow, the majesty of it drives all your thoughts, your concerns, your problems away. Have you noticed that? You say, “How beautiful it is,” and for two seconds perhaps, or for even a minute, you are absolutely silent. The grandeur of it drives away, for that second, the pettiness of ourselves. That immensity has taken us over. Like a child occupied with an intricate toy for an hour; he won’t talk, he won’t make any noise, he is completely absorbed in that. The toy has absorbed him. So the mountain absorbs you and therefore for the second, or the minute, you are absolutely quiet, which means there is no self. Now, without being absorbed by something — either a toy, a mountain, a face, or an idea — to be completely without the me in oneself, is the essence of beauty.
(Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness [source])
…and:
… It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
… From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:Rain on the river.
(Albert Goldbarth [source])
…and:
I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers… The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
(Ken Kesey [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The Cave Painters
Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch
until the great rock chamber
flowered around them and they stood
in an enormous womb of
flickering light and darklight, a place
to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows
over the sleeker shapes of radiance.They’ve left the world of weather and panic
behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark
in their wake, pushing as one pulse
to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells
are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries
and the binding juices oozed
out of chosen barks. The beastsbegin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts
(soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)
stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours
mould those forms from chance, coaxing
rigid dips and folds and bulges
to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,
a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes
curling to a crazy gallop.Intent and human, they attach
the mineral, vegetable, animal
realms to themselves, inscribing
the one unbroken line
everything depends on, from that
impenetrable centre
to the outer intangibles of light and air, even
the speed of the horse, the bison’s fear, the arc
of gentleness that this big-bellied cow
arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing
dance of death that
bristles out of the buck’s
struck flank. On this one line they leave
a beak-headed human figure of sticks
and one small, chalky, human hand.We’ll never know if they worked in silence
like people praying — the way our monks
illuminated their own dark ages
in cross-hatched rocky cloisters,
where they contrived a binding
labyrinth of lit affinities
to spell out in nature’s lace and fable
their mindful, blinding sixth sense
of a god of shadows — or whether (like birds
tracing their great bloodlines over the globe)
they kept a constant gossip up
of praise, encouragement, complaint.It doesn’t matter: we know
they went with guttering rushlight
into the dark; came to terms
with the given world; must have had
— as their hands moved steadily
by spiderlight — one desire
we’d recognise: they would — before going on
beyond this border zone, this nowhere
that is now here — leave something
upright and bright behind them in the dark.
(Eamon Grennan [source])
I’m afraid I know almost nothing about Nat Baldwin, except that he sings and plays the bass — the bass, not bass guitar. He doesn’t seem to have a Web site of his own, outside of MySpace. There’s nothing about him on Wikipedia. I’ve seen him described as “the bass player in the Dirty Projectors,” but I don’t know anything about them, either — except that their Wikipedia entry says:
…critics have likened The Dirty Projectors to musicians from many genres. For example, critics have compared them to New Wave artists David Byrne and Squeeze, pop stars Beyoncé and Mariah Carey, and Progressive rock musicians Frank Zappa and Yes.
(That must be the only time all those names have appeared in the same sentence. If you’re curious, the band’s music seems to have plenty of videos online.)
I’ve had the video below in my Drafts pipeline for months now — Nat Baldwin, bass and vocals, performing “In the Hollows” in a (fractal?) space beneath a highway overpass in Ontario. His, well, his unconventional voice works pretty well with the sawing of the bow across the strings:
_______________________________
* In fact, to create such a seeming oxymoronic monstrosity of geometry, you must construct a Menger sponge completely — to its conclusion, somewhere on the far side of an infinitely distant horizon of time and activity. It’s Zeno’s Paradox, projected onto three dimensions as you successively carve away more and more actual material. At last you end up with an object (like a wireframe) consisting of an infinite number of one-dimensional lines — hence, the infinite surface area — and, because there’s no material left between the lines at this point, the total volume is zero. The odds of building (or is it unbuilding?) a complete Menger sponge seem, well, minuscule. You can find a poem about the Menger sponge at the Poetry Foundation site; that’s where I found this quote, from Paul Valéry:
God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through.
Seems a fitting close for today’s post, hmm?
whaddayamean says
i love the image. it’s great.
hey, what’s the attribution on that last quote? is it a JES original?
John says
Er, which “last quote”? The capsule review of the Dirty Projectors came from Wikipedia. The line about God’s nothing is from Paul Valéry; it’s cited around the Web, and apparently comes from a 1942 book of aphorisms called Mauvaises Pensées. I can’t find the book itself online to confirm that, though.
Aside from the Valéry quotation, the footnote was “a JES original.” My mind seized on the infinite surface area/zero volume description and, until I’d explained it myself, wouldn’t let go. You know how it is. :)
There are SO MANY Menger cube images on the Web. A relatively sparse handful are photographs of real objects; most, by far, are digital artworks. The successive iterations of the “remove all the center sub-cubes from THAT cube” instruction tax even super-powerful computers, once you get past, oh, six or ten cycles. (A hot new computing accessory in recent years is the 3D printer, which forms an actual three-dimensional object using “instructions” from, say, a CAD drawing. I haven’t heard of a supercomputer working at a Menger cube, which it then — when exhausted, albeit not “done” — passed to a 3D printer. But the result would be interesting. Something like a cube of rectilinear lace.) My second choice of an image to use was a “Moebius Menger cube,” but that was a step too far for me!
Froog says
Many years ago, I read – in a horror/sci-fi anthology: they used to be my typical holiday reading when I was 10-12 – a short story about a clan of prehistoric hunters who used cave painting not to celebrate a successful hunt, but as an auspicious invocation to try to guarantee one before they set out. A runty young boy, otherwise useless to the clan (I forget: possibly deformed or disabled in some way, certainly too physically slight to distinguish himself as a hunter or warrior), proves to be a particularly skillful painter – not just in the elegance of the images he produces, but in their power: when he paints the hunting party killing a big bison, they kill a big bison. Is it just coincidence, good luck, or… does he have some kind of psychic ability to see what’s going to happen on the hunt? Well, it turns out his power is even greater than that: his art actually determines the future. Which means that when he starts rubbing out and trying to redraw some his pictures, very nasty things happen.
It’s a great idea, and very well executed; but I can’t now remember the title or the author, I’m afraid. The clan leader was called He Who Carries A Red Spear – I imagine that might help to track it down online.
John says
The Bone Forest. Specifically, the story “Magic Man.” :)
Froog says
Ha! I might have known you’d dig that up before I’d even got around to looking.
Or did you already know that?
John says
Soooo tempting to say, airily, that I already knew it. But no. Just before going to bed last night I did a run through email on the new phone, and found your comment (RAMH comments being auto-forwarded to me via email). I almost postponed reply to this morning, but the challenge was too tempting — especially since you’d posted the hints so recently.
Biggest challenge wasn’t finding the answer, but entering it on the page using the damned phone. Boy, do I hate typing punctuation with the thing — especially entering HTML, like what I needed to italicize the book title and, sheesh, to link to Wikipedia. Need to see if I can find an app which inserts HTML code into online comment forms using keystroke macros or something. (I do have a WordPress-for-Android app, but have never used it to reply to comments and didn’t feel like futzing around with it last night.)
Which is a heck of a reply to a simple question. Infinite surface area and zero volume, indeed.
Jayne says
I love Goldbarth’s piece. “Rain on the river.” All of this makes me think of the Tao of things–produces all things and nourishes them.
And Baldwin. :) Speaking of a certain flow–will be surfing iTunes…
John says
Well, your musical tastes are more… sometimes adventurous than mine, let’s say. Browsing the Dirty Projectors’ oeuvre, or what I could find of it online, didn’t yield a whole lot that I myself cared to listen to more than once. But their fans seem unambivalent. Comments like There are SO MANY great songs on Album X!!!, etc.
Did you by any chance hit the “[source]” link for the Goldbarth poem? It’s actually just an excerpt from a much larger piece. A sort of introductory note atop that larger piece said:
The excerpt quoted by whiskey river, and then requoted above, is Goldbarth’s answer to a “question” by Walt Whitman: Who need be afraid of the merge? (This was a line in the first edition of Leaves of Grass which inveterate tinkerer Whitman apparently removed in later ones.) Goldbarth’s “answer” came from a book of his which I couldn’t find online. I couldn’t quite draw a line from the “question” to the “answer,” but I liked the latter a lot on its own. :)
Jayne says
After looking at a few vids of Baldwin I found nothing that really spoke to me, though, he does know how to, how did you say, saw his bow over those strings.
I didn’t follow the source link for Goldbarth but now that I know he was inspired by a Whitman question, well, I’m even more so intrigued. Oh the places your sources go… ;)
John says
Yeah — for maybe 90% of the performers I mention here, I can always a few more selections which I might’ve used instead. Nat B seems to be among the 10%.
A couple days ago at 7-Imp, Jules said something about my fondness for “zigzag Web research.” I do love the magic of hyperlinks.
Froog says
I see from that link that Robert Holdstock’s ‘Magic Man’ first appeared in a collection called Frighteners 2 in 1976 – which was indeed the summer when I was 12.
John says
…which just made me wonder if you’d still remember any of the other stories in the book. I found a complete list of titles at the Internet Book List, but couldn’t find the book’s contents themselves anywhere online. Physical (and of course USED) copies are available from Amazon and various other sellers, though!
(Here’s a whole discussion thread about the book, at a site called Vault of Evil: Brit Horror Pulp Plus!)
Froog says
I don’t think I should encourage you any more. You usually take the weekends off.
I remember all the titles, but none of the stories resonate very much. The Thirteenth Kestrel (a formulaic number about a haunted/jinxed plane) and Substitute (a Walter Mitty-style story that takes a dark twist when the protagonist’s ‘fantasy life’ starts to appear partly real) are the only ones I remember much of at all; and the lasting impression is of a good idea not completely realised.
‘Magic Man’ is in a different class. I think. I have probably only read it once or twice, nearly 35 years ago, so my sense of its quality may be fallible, delusional.
Nance says
Krishnamurti and Kesey and Zappa…oh, my! We’ve had a transcendent week, have we? (And, would it ever be worthwhile in these Friday posts to mention what sort of week you’ve had? I wonder sometimes.)
Nat Baldwin would sing while he painted in the guttering rushlight. I believe he still is. He has the eyes of a cave painter.
John says
This comment — the parenthetical portion — triggered in me some sort of existential crisis. I think today’s post came, in part, out of that crisis… a sense that I’ve been sleepwalking here, while preoccupied there (i.e., in offline writing and revising and such). And in the meantime, wondering (if not yet quite worried) about what the next “there” might be.
If I were Nat Baldwin, I’d blush and go all shy to be told I had the eyes of a cave painter. And you bet I’d check it out the next time I was at a mirror.
Nance says
Oh, dear. I am sorry. It was my job for too many years to trigger existential crises as a matter of course…or, if not to trigger them, then to flush them, give them voice, if you will; I’m afraid I’m not quite civilized. But I am always, always interested in what sort of experience my friends are having. Mr. Mature grew afraid to take me to military cocktail parties because I couldn’t be counted on not to ask my favorite question when introduced to someone new: “So, what do you think of life so far?”
That’s the question RAMH is always thoughtfully, considerately addressing, I think. Maybe that’s why I’m fond of it.
Nance says
Just went after Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music.” I’ll be gone for a bit.
John says
Ha. Surfaced yet?
marta says
The post was lovely, JES, but my favorite part was reading about Froog’s short story past and your digging it up.
I’m tempted to leave a note about a novel I loved as a kid but never could find again…
John says
Froog knows that he doesn’t need explicitly to request a search — all he’s got to say is something like, “I can’t remember the title, but…” or “I once read a poem/short story/novel” or “…saw a film whose name escapes me now.” And I’m off, baying.
It’s always fun, and even when I come up empty-handed on THE question, I always learn something new. I don’t know how people can just stay on one Web page for more than 10 or 15 minutes (unless they’re leaving it open while doing something else, of course, or watching a lengthy vid/listening to a long audio clip); all those glowing-colored and sometimes boldfaced or underlined words and phrases, to my mind, go ding-ding-ding. Like wind chimes beckoning me out of doors. (Well, except that wind chimes almost never succeed.)
Froog says
I hadn’t realised until a few years ago how musicians – well, players of certain instruments anyway – favour underpasses for their acoustic qualities (rather than just as busy but sheltered spots to try a bit of busking). There are several spots near where I live that are regular haunts for Chinese saxophonists (and they’re definitely not busking: it’s a walkway beside a canal that has almost no foot traffic).
The Querulous Squirrel says
Exceptionally inspiring post. I especially love the Ken Kesey quote. I’m going to steal it. It’s the essence of performing good psychotherapy. People come for answers and there are only mysteries. It is the only way to live a creative life.
John says
I didn’t think of that quotation’s relationship to psychotherapy, but you’re right! All I’d connected it to was writing. (I’d love for people to conclude that whatever is right about my writing is right by intention rather than happy accident. But an awful lot of what goes on between intention and manuscript is utter mystery. :)