Grids & Curves

Río Tuito, Yelapa, Mexico       Photo by: Mara Alper

           

             Flying across our country, I am struck by the contrast between the grids of cities and farmland, and the curves of billowing clouds.  Rectilinear culture is alien to me. Instead, I seek curvilinear places that follow the rivers edge, the ocean’s shore, the jagged curves of mountains, smooth curved hills. My flesh echoes these forms. Are there any rectangles in my body? I attempt a right angle at my elbow and knee, but they turn a smooth corner, the muscles round the skin. I am shaped like water, by water, curvilinear. We all are.

            The rectilinear world does not heed water unless it must and even then, it loves straight canals and dams that span rough rivers and amorphous lakes like a straight edged ruler, restraining the flow, constraining the natural curves.

            Is this the way we lost touch with water? Imposed a grid on it? The curved faucets and spigots that gracefully bring us water are the last curve in the rectangles, the only curving flow within our solid right-angled homes.

            The more curving forms a culture honors, the more it honors water. Angular cultures are dominating cultures, subduing the curves of life into manageable linear forms – rivers diverted to flat dams, mountain tops flattened by mining. Defying and containing elements that appear chaotic, but are really quite orderly within their own flowing form.

            The science of chaos is about the deep order that linear systems don’t acknowledge. Modern science has ruled out whatever does not fit elegant equations. Yet the science of chaos reveals that the tiny increments dismissed by linear thought make tremendous differences. What grid lovers see as chaos is actually a complex system with its own elegant, elusive order.

            The clouds, mountains, water and human emotions all fit the chaos paradigm, confounding the world of grids.

 

Visit www.MaraAlper.com for more info.