An imagined conversation:
“Tessellations Anyone?”
“No. No thanks. Not interested.”
“Are you sure? Do you even know what
a tessellation is?”
“Well—no. What are they?”
“They're interlocking geometrical
patterns.”
“Huh?”
“You know—Escher?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
 |
| My Owl Tessellation |
From Amish quilts, Persian rugs, and
Turkish tiled floors to Escher's magically interlocking reptiles and
birds, the world is filled with patterns. And the patterns are
defined by symmetry. There is symmetry, though imperfect, in every
face and in every living thing. There is also symmetry—even greater
symmetry in some cases—in inanimate matter.
Come with me for a moment and pretend
you are some sort of a wave, perhaps an X-ray, whizzing through a
mineral structure as planes of atoms fly by … until you bounce off
one of them like a trampoline and out you come. (Warning: Creative
license employed here. Scientists may cringe.)
And now you're transformed like a
butterfly, returning to your human self with a crystal in your hand,
and you know that the internal pattern you saw is right there in
front of you, though you no longer see the tinker toy structure—that
atomic playground for X-rays. Instead you see its manifestation in
those beautifully reflective crystal faces, which either you (if you
are female) or your sister, girlfriend, or wife (if you are male)
will almost certainly love.
The symmetry of those beautiful
crystals is the same basic symmetry found in Escher's tessellations,
except that Escher's symmetry was two dimensional and crystals are
3D. I wonder if we would love gems so much if, rather than nice, tidy
structures, they were something amorphous resembling the Blob.
Consider geodes. It is not that walnut-like outer shell that so
fascinates us with them. Otherwise we might never crack them open to
see the gems inside.
Maybe in all of this we can ask a
question: What is beauty? For you who have a beloved, would you love
their face so much if it didn't have a certain degree of symmetry?
And yet I dare say that people are often like geodes. From the
outside, so many of us look ordinary. But crack us open and you are
apt to find hidden gems. In the case of crystals, the beautifully
symmetrical exterior mimics the structured interior, but for people
this is not always the case. To some extent, we may see in a person's
outward actions the inner beauty that they possess. But what they
look like is irrelevant, because the soul is distinct from the body.
Have you ever really thought about
that? Have you ever sat beneath the cloud drifting sky while the
grasses waved at your feet and just meditated on that thought? I am
more what I am on the inside than what I am on the outside. “Beauty
is only skin deep,” they say. And what if I could Freaky Friday my
way into a body to match my inner beauty? Would I like what I saw in
the mirror? Some people would become more attractive … some people
less so. Then I suppose we really could judge by what we see …
And if we could judge by sight, then maybe we could avoid the people who seem bent on hurting us. Or
maybe we would look back on the people who hurt us and realize that
they weren't so bent on hurting us as we thought—that the offense
we've held against them is actually their greatest sorrow … their
biggest regret. But, worst of all, we might look at those we think
have wronged us and see nothing more than ourselves as though looking
in a mirror. We might see the symmetry between us and finally
remember all the people that we hurt—the things we did that we
excused with weak explanations while accepting no such explanations
from those who hurt us. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: to
have been hurt or to have been the one to hurt.
You see, even life itself is
symmetrical. It has a beginning and an end. And in the middle we are
each like patches in a quilt, our lives stitched together with others
… sometimes for better … sometimes for worse. Sometimes the
stitches fray and come loose. Sometimes they are torn apart
dramatically with the ripped ends still tingling with pain like
nerves. And the fabric of a patch itself may be ripped and torn so
that it begins to unravel with seemingly irreparable damage. But
where one has harmed another may heal: Ugly, withered hands.
Thimbled, pinpricked hands. Tired, cramping hands. Dutiful, beautiful
hands.
