I’ve been looking around at my world recently. It’s really too cold to do anything else, although there is a lot to do both inside and outside. Probably things will slip away from me again, as they do every year no matter how carefully I begin the year’s work a bit earlier each time. February has as its poetic name in Japanese “kisaragi” (double up on the clothes), in other words add an extra layer because this is really the coldest month. This year anyway that seems to be true. Minus (degrees C) temperatures every night and well into the morning, “high” of just barely not freezing in the middle of the afternoon. For me, February is the longest month of the year. Every day seems like an endurance test when space heaters are all I have and I must think about what I want to do, what room I want to go into, about 15 or 20 minutes beforehand so that I can crank up the heater and at least take the chill off before going in there. I’m never really “warm” except in bed or neck deep in hot water in the bathtub.
Anyway, only a few weeks left of this. I was talking about looking around. Like most people, I am surrounded by squares and rectangles; each room I inhabit is some version of a cube, with corners and “right” (ninety-degree) angles everywhere. I suspect that one big reason people are urged to spend time in Nature for mental health is that there are very few ninety-degree angles in Nature. Look around sometime. Even branches of trees very rarely grow from the parent trunk at a ninety-degree angle. Everything is unregimented, random, rough, and it’s a great relief to lose oneself in those irregular angles after being stuck in what comes to seem like a giant web of ninety-degree angles in a human-centered environment.
Doors, windows, paper shoji. Floors and ceilings. Pictures and paintings. Paper and files. Tables and trays. Computer screens, phone screens, TV screens. Is there no place in human life to escape from this uncompromising angle? How did we come to surround ourselves with “right” angles at every turn, even when it’s not necessary? The only really ubiquitous “other” shape is the circle – our dishes, plates and cups are made to this pattern. Thank goodness for this small bit of relief for our eyes and brains.
I can think of several reasons why we settled on this angle and shape for most things in our lives. One, because our bodies are based on two and four. Dancing and music are also, when they aren’t based on three; four beats to the bar is called “common” time and is even indicated at the beginning of music with a big “C” which is the same meaning as the normal 4/4 time signature. This is the very essence of rhythm. This is understandable as we have two hands and two feet, and two of a lot of other things on our bodies, which themselves are not circular or five-pointed, but symmetrical vertically. As everyone who has ever looked for a lost sock will attest, we have to deal with the number two on a regular basis, from birth to death, simply because that’s the way our bodies are.
Another reason why we are surrounded by squares and rectangles is for engineering and design purposes. Architecture is the science of building large structures which, from time immemorial, have been based on squares or rectangles, presumably because four points and the square is stable from an engineering standpoint. And it became the easiest angle to work with, and other angles (for example the equilateral triangle, which is very elegantly composed of three 60-degree angles) were left in the dust. Manufacturing created lots more squares and rectangles, and gradually that came to be the norm. Just about everything now is straight lines forming squares and rectangles. It’s very hard to get away from it.
We even superimpose this shape in places where that angle never existed, such as on the planet. Veggie patches are arranged in rows and rectangles, it is very rare to come across a spiral shaped field, or a circular one, though it is perfectly possible to make it. We draw imaginary lines on the earth, latitude and longitude, to box in places that have never known a box before (such as the ocean). We even divide the sky into “quadrants”. It becomes a way to divide our lives – are we vertical or horizontal, going up or down? This polarization of thought, in a way, gave rise to the drive to put everything in boxes. And from there it is only a short step to the most noxious form of polarization of all, the concept of winning and losing, of me superior and you inferior, and thus I can trample on you. Me and you, different. Me and every other “thing” around me, different. Not a continuum in any way. We can make differences, divide everything into two kinds, by putting things in boxes, with lines and with words. It’s harder to dissolve the lines and see that everything is connected.
You would have to go very far back in human experience to find, for example, houses or buildings or street grids that are not made of ninety-degree angles (though now, with plastic = the possibility of other shapes, we can see them being used experimentally). It is part and parcel of being human, somehow. Still, I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if everything were circular, for example, or triangular. How would our brains be different? Would we have evolved the same way? Or did our brains, at some point, “choose” this mode of being, and thus our material world came to be dominated by it?
Recently in my art I have been experimenting with other shapes, some irregular. It’s going to be difficult to figure out how to preserve them without the traditional (rectangular) framing process; but it might be an interesting exercise in the degree of plasticity in the physical world, and also a doorway to explore the essential process of universality and connection. Is this angle really as rigid as it seems? How difficult is it to break out of this? Did we, at some point, confuse “difficult” with “impossible” and thus box ourselves in?
Comentários