infinity in a grain of sand
Jan. 16th, 2008 06:04 pmFor a while now, I've been cooking. Sort of, at least - I make pizza and share it with my boyfriends on a regular basis. There are a handful of ingredients involved - and I'm the one who keeps track of those particular ingredients, and maintains the stock of them. I try to make sure that there's always more than enough for just one pizza on hand at any time.
Sometimes when I'm going to the store I'll look in the fridge beforehand, and write down which things I need. But sometimes I'll go to the store for just one thing (Diet Coke or cookies, usually), and then think that while I'm there, I may as well get pizza bits. So I have to try and remember what I need.
A peculiar sort of mental gesture has become associated with this. It's vaguely related to imagining myself opening the fridge and looking inside - but only vaguely, what with having to bend down, and probably push something out of the way to see exactly what the stock of pizza bits is. Really, it's not like that at all. I wrinkle my brows and look up in the air, and there's this kinesthetic sense of unfolding. Of turning something on more than one axis at once, so that a previously-hidden facet is exposed in some weird orientation. And with this done, then I can somehow know if I need cheese, if I need dough, if I need pineapple chunks or pepperoni or garlic or whatever.
I never have to put it away, either. I guess it twists and folds back up by itself when I return my mental focus to being in Market Basket and shopping, or something.
When I was small, there was one thing that I found weirdly fascinating, now and then, about my parents' house. It was a one-story thing. Three bedrooms and a bathroom were off of a central hall; the hall opened directly with no door out into the living/dining area.
Except it didn't, not quite. There was this little turn you'd have to make when leaving the hall, to get around the central AC. And there was a door in the hall, right before this turn. A flimsy wooden thing, with slats. Folded in half as it closed for some reason - I think so it wouldn't block the way into the bathroom.
The fact that you could close the bedroom and bathroom doors, then close this rickety, meaningless door was... interesting. Here was a space you could bring night to, in the middle of the day.
I didn't sit in it regularly, or anything like that. Though I vaguely remember sitting in there with everything closed, reading, at least once. It was... I guess it was almost a sacred space, somehow. The door in the hall turned what was a prosaic corridor into a place that was at once a room, and not a room.
Both of these are things I thought of while reading through Mapping the Starmaze. A slight variant of a simple puzzle that you've probably encountered dozens of times struck a chord in this man's mind, leading him to map out all the possible states of this puzzle, and the connections between them.
He thought of the 3x3 grid of on-off switches as a representation of a maze. Each state of it? A room. The rooms got names. The rooms accumulated into places. He built a Hypercard stack (hot new tech, back then) to explore this imaginary place. The hexagrams of the I Ching got stirred into his map, as markers, as mnemonics. He created an imaginary tradition of walking a path that visits every room in this maze over the course of a year, which brought in astrological correspondences. Elemental and seasonal associations. Names for the room shapes.
From a 3x3 grid of switches with simple rules for changing the state, he got places like this:
The whole thing, it turns out, is isomorphic to a nine-dimensional hypercube. This realization let him finally map this maze that he'd been playing with for years.
This is what the human mind is built for. Finding patterns. Playing with other systems as analogies for them, maybe even as ways to transform the problem at hand into a completely new thing. Creating significance where there is none and using that to change something in the world or yourself. We tell ourselves stories; we use the systems we find or inherit to inspire these stories. We fold these stories upon themselves in dimensions we can't see, we expand them out to find tiny details in passages we glossed over.
We tell ourselves stories of who we are, all day long, every day.
Sometimes when I'm going to the store I'll look in the fridge beforehand, and write down which things I need. But sometimes I'll go to the store for just one thing (Diet Coke or cookies, usually), and then think that while I'm there, I may as well get pizza bits. So I have to try and remember what I need.
A peculiar sort of mental gesture has become associated with this. It's vaguely related to imagining myself opening the fridge and looking inside - but only vaguely, what with having to bend down, and probably push something out of the way to see exactly what the stock of pizza bits is. Really, it's not like that at all. I wrinkle my brows and look up in the air, and there's this kinesthetic sense of unfolding. Of turning something on more than one axis at once, so that a previously-hidden facet is exposed in some weird orientation. And with this done, then I can somehow know if I need cheese, if I need dough, if I need pineapple chunks or pepperoni or garlic or whatever.
I never have to put it away, either. I guess it twists and folds back up by itself when I return my mental focus to being in Market Basket and shopping, or something.
When I was small, there was one thing that I found weirdly fascinating, now and then, about my parents' house. It was a one-story thing. Three bedrooms and a bathroom were off of a central hall; the hall opened directly with no door out into the living/dining area.
Except it didn't, not quite. There was this little turn you'd have to make when leaving the hall, to get around the central AC. And there was a door in the hall, right before this turn. A flimsy wooden thing, with slats. Folded in half as it closed for some reason - I think so it wouldn't block the way into the bathroom.
The fact that you could close the bedroom and bathroom doors, then close this rickety, meaningless door was... interesting. Here was a space you could bring night to, in the middle of the day.
I didn't sit in it regularly, or anything like that. Though I vaguely remember sitting in there with everything closed, reading, at least once. It was... I guess it was almost a sacred space, somehow. The door in the hall turned what was a prosaic corridor into a place that was at once a room, and not a room.
Both of these are things I thought of while reading through Mapping the Starmaze. A slight variant of a simple puzzle that you've probably encountered dozens of times struck a chord in this man's mind, leading him to map out all the possible states of this puzzle, and the connections between them.
He thought of the 3x3 grid of on-off switches as a representation of a maze. Each state of it? A room. The rooms got names. The rooms accumulated into places. He built a Hypercard stack (hot new tech, back then) to explore this imaginary place. The hexagrams of the I Ching got stirred into his map, as markers, as mnemonics. He created an imaginary tradition of walking a path that visits every room in this maze over the course of a year, which brought in astrological correspondences. Elemental and seasonal associations. Names for the room shapes.
From a 3x3 grid of switches with simple rules for changing the state, he got places like this:
- Deep
- One of the four house types in a three-dimensional starmaze. Deeps are formed from the bases of the four towers and are located in a vast grotto beneath the maze. They rise up from the waters of the grotto; the lowest rooms in three of the deeps are beneath the waterline and contain thick glass windows which function as aquariums. Rooms on the fourth level contain piers which provide crossings to adjacent deeps via a system of automated cockleshell boats. There are four deeps, one for each of the four temples. The north deep, comprising the House of Judgement, contains a series of courtrooms and dungeons. The south deep, comprising the House of Lamentation, provides a secluded retreat for those recovering from great loss who are not yet ready to face the world again. The west deep, comprising the House of Whispers, includes a series of vents in the rock through which sigh the winds of the nearby ocean and is the seat of a mysterious oracle. The east deep, comprising the House of Darkness, is partially encased in the surrounding rock with interior rooms connected by rough-hewn tunnels. Its ivory outer walls reflect the light of the oculus onto the other deeps, but little of this light penetrates the dimly-lit rooms within.
The whole thing, it turns out, is isomorphic to a nine-dimensional hypercube. This realization let him finally map this maze that he'd been playing with for years.
This is what the human mind is built for. Finding patterns. Playing with other systems as analogies for them, maybe even as ways to transform the problem at hand into a completely new thing. Creating significance where there is none and using that to change something in the world or yourself. We tell ourselves stories; we use the systems we find or inherit to inspire these stories. We fold these stories upon themselves in dimensions we can't see, we expand them out to find tiny details in passages we glossed over.
We tell ourselves stories of who we are, all day long, every day.