The Shape of Things that Are

Though shapely curves always deserve uncritical delight, which was what the last post was for, they're also worth some reflection.

What is a curve? It's the way that a shape holds a relationship with its surroundings. There are two main relationships possible: angles and curves. Curves seem to hold their shape in a gentler fashion. They ease into the atmosphere, whereas angles bite. Also, it's harder to hurt yourself on an curve.

Higher geometry pays homage to the curve by extending the meaning of the word in an analogous sense to describe all loci traced by a moving point, so that a line is defined as a straight curve.

A round shape is the final form matters takes when the beating forces of time and the cosmos eliminate all quirks and leave a final tough kernel, in its best defensive posture, like pebbles, or the last-ditch Roman legionary maneuver, the orbem formate. It's the form the planets, the sun and the other stars take to dance across the galaxy. Rivers wind down to the sea, eyes gaze, and tables turn. Curvature is the normal condition of the natural world.

Ambition creates angular shapes. An angle is a challenge to the forces of the universe to break it. It usually has some purpose the environment doesn't appreciate, though most environments eventually surrender - the plow and the pump turned the marshes of East Anglia into fertile black velvet fields. Angles and lines are generally the work of the hand of men to master nature. After the U.S. suffered from its lack of roads during it combat with western Indians in the War of 1812, it commissioned a survey for a military highway from Detroit to Chicago. The inspector found that by the far cheapest route to improve was the old Sauk Indian trail, which wound its way through southern Michigan, fording all the rivers at the shallowest points, and crossing the marshes at their driest. The Indians did not aim to master, and the commissioner had a middling sort of ambition. The Romans, on the far hand, built bee-line roads across Europe that last till this day.

Curved things wear their beauty by fitting into the pattern of the world; their first fresh wildness tugs the heart, but their true grace comes with cultivation. Angles bear their beauty principally in the mind of their maker, and less often for their appearance than for their suitability to his purpose - in a word, their workmanship; but the beauty of a curve is an end in itself.

So there seems to be a natural resemblance between angles and curves and masculinity and femininity, as many have thought before. Also consider that nothing sharpens the loveliness of a curve so well as a line. But now we reach mystic matters, so it's time to be silent.

There is a third kind of relationship of a shape to its surroundings which I haven't mentioned. That is the fractal. It's a shape whose parts resemble the shape of the whole, repeating down into infinity. The curve resembles it more closely than does the angle, just as there's a good argument to be made that the nature of woman is closer than man's to the mysterious centre of God (see Gene Edward's The Divine Romance). It's impossible to conceive apart from its mathematical equation, for at its revelation the image is infinitely marvelous. It's the tuck of design within design. Perhaps it's the corresponding shape of divinity.


Illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, Paradiso by Gustave Doré. Plate 34. Dante and Beatrice and the Heavenly Host of Angels (Canto 31: The Saintly Throng in the Form of a Rose)