Greetings from a secret cafe which I have been frequenting recently in an effort to get out and about more. Writing here in this cafe feels like a nice change from my usual environment at home and, since the ambience is so pleasant here, it got me thinking about environments, about harmony, and even about mathematics art, which I have written about below.
Gentle Reader,
I wish to talk to you about mathematics. Long before I started writing, I had gathered lots of interesting quotes and I had made made note of nice phrases which came to mind. As a reader of fiction, it was always beauty that compelled me, a certain orderliness of language, the sounds of the words, the rhythm, odd bits of syntax:
Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.
And let’s not forget of course, the opening line of my favourite novel, which gets better every time I read it, and I have read it…many times.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
The italicisations above are mine, italicised for stylistic reasons…but I am losing the run of myself already – we were talking about vibe harmonisation, which could also be called consonance, symmetry, a sensation that alles ist truly in Ordnung.
What I didn’t realise when I began to write was that all my lovely phrases which I had thought of were as good as useless in isolation. Not only did they not drive the narrative, but they also seemed peculiar, out of place. This is because they were plucked from different emotional, geographic and stylistic landscapes…and it turns out that when you write a book, or paint a painting, or conduct an orchestra, everything must flow in a sort of rhythm.
In this respect, good artistic work has a central core or idea, which is echoed every which way throughout the work, after the manner of fractals. Fractals are a mathematical concept which describe infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. Such patterns are evident in nature, for example tree branches which resemble the tree trunk itself, and which then go on to form further branches, following the same pattern.
Why is this good, in nature and in art? Perhaps because humans are wired to look for patterns or perhaps because if we identify something in art which reminds of nature it is pleasing, or perhaps because the human being craves, at some level, order and duplication, or the presence of a central theme. Remember, in school we had to identify the themes in a piece of writing or a work of art? It seemed very academic, but in the end it’s just an acknowledgement that humans like themes.
I see this idea of fractalisation everywhere, maybe in a less strictly mathematical way, but more through the lens of consonance. If you look at fashion, I made the same mistakes in clothing choices as I made in writing choices – I would pluck a nice jumper or t-shirt from the store the same way I would copy and paste a nice phrase into my novel, without regard for how it fits into the whole scheme of things. For example, I can wear a very nice Donegal tweed raglan wool overcoat, but if I’m wearing a pair of tracksuit pants underneath it, the whole outfit won’t look good.
There can be harmony, in clothing, on several different scales. The above is on the scale of formality, but one’s silhouette could also be inharmonious, for example if a man wears a pair of skinny jeans with a broad overcoat, he runs the risk of looking oddly top heavy.
The greatest artists, of course, break all these rules in ways which are hard to understand. Joyce, for example, in Ulysses, writes in almost a different style in every chapter, but even if stylistic harmony is broken, I like to think that harmony is maintained at some level across the book, perhaps in ways not always discernible to the reader and, in his last work Finnegans Wake, there sure is a kind of wild, disorderly, but somehow harmonic chaos enfolding, and perhaps culminating, at the end…somehow.
As a final point, harmony is why I like this cafe. It is old, and when I look around at the hardwood floor, at the fireplace and paintings and the aged mirror, it feels as if all is in concert. The cardinal error, here, is to put something new or modern into what feels like a more mature space, just as a newly-built house can look strange in rural landscapes, having made no allowance for its surroundings, and appearing as though it were dropped out of an aeroplane.
And here, in this cafe, there is harmony amongst the people within, too. We all have a certain vibe; there are is a feeling that some here are lost souls; others are vagrants, Bohemians, slackers, writers, foreigners, students, literati and illiterati. This, more or less, is my tribe. Earlier, I heard two men speaking of Beckett – one must always speak of Beckett, in cafes. Or, if not, at least of fractals…
I must put the pen down now and get myself another coffee to sit here with, after pressing the send button. It is one of my favourite things, to sit somewhere and feel seen, where I can enjoy the feeling of company while maintaining a certain solitude. One feels as if one is in a little secret community, and I love it in the same way that I love other the shared spaces towards which I habitually gravitate: hotel lobbies, hostels, and other such dens of iniquity, where I can be amongst others and yet to still be alone.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy my writing. If you do, tell me about it, as I rarely pass up an opportunity to receive a compliment. You can also click below to subscribe, if of interest.
Affiliates: Reader, if you would like to write nice things on a nice e-ink device with a nice pen in a nice cafe, check out the Supernote digital notebook which I bring everywhere with me. I also wrote a little post about it here. I am also affiliated with the harmonious tribe known as the Pathless Path Community, where we encourage each other to live and create in alignment – my affiliate link is here if you would like to be One of Us.
I love the comment on fractals in writing. Fractal theory has profound implications for aesthetics and philosophy and shows with mathematics is one of the liberal arts and not just "M" in "STEM". Some of Benoit Mandelbrot's original graphs of fractals approach the status of modern art.