 |
Although I spent a year
reading, several times, Michael Schneider’s A Beginner’s Guide to
Constructing the Universe, the little I know of geometry has been
mostly an accident of attention. When recently asked about his approach to
the planning and structure of the team’s offense, Phoenix Sun’s point
guard, Stephon Marbury said, “I just hoop.” And he does. As an artist, I
just play. In mixing specific geometric forms on the
background-to-foreground axis, I started with the egg, and chose the
subsequent forms intuitively.S
Apollonius of Perga, one
of the luminaries of the Golden Age of Greek Mathematics, wrote in The
Treasury of Analysis, now lost, a treatise on a ”special body of
doctrine for those who after going through the usual elements, wish to
obtain power to solve problems involving curves.” Don’t we all. But my
interest was drawn to Apollonius for his work in conics. He deduced the
line that circumscribes a circle on one plane extends through the point to
describe a circle in another plane.
In a conversation with a
friend about the nature of consciousness, we found as a working model the
use of a flashlight in the dark. It illuminates objects and topography and
shows everything from here to there. We found interesting ideas about
time, what was seen, and what will be seen, from this model. But when one
becomes aware of the cone of light, a new direction unfolds; one that is
analogous to Apollonius’ discovery of a second cone, which simultaneously
reveals our inner topography as present in every moment of consciousness. |
