The Weight of the Invisible (from the series Photosyntheticism)

The Tokyo Girl is awash with the invisible. She told me once, through a curtain of laughter, that the invisible weighs much more than the visible. She has a manner of speaking that strips you of the ability to argue. Maybe one could object with some kind of rational thrust; “If something’s invisible, how do we know it exists?” or “Please explain how the invisible has any mass at all?” or “Why don’t we just get a weighing machine and test this out?”

But you can’t catch her like that. She will smile at you, like only she can, and say, “A thought can move a whole army. So how much does an army weigh? And how much more must that thought weigh if it can push a whole army about?”

I encountered her sadness once. It was a September day. She was looking through the bedroom curtains at a troublesome sky. She said, “One day a long time ago, they dropped a huge weight of knowledge from the sky. Nobody is really sure how much that knowledge weighed, but it weighed a tremendous amount. It weighed so much that when it fell on the people below, it squashed them to nothing. Some of them were so squashed that there was nothing left of them except their shadow. They dropped all that knowledge on a place called Hiroshima.”

Our Lady of the Fractals (from the series Photosyntheticism)

I’ve heard it said that beauty can be defined – that the beautiful ones among us conform to some mathematical formula that adheres exactly to a ratio of proportion; the famous “Canon of Proportion.” So why have the rest of us been so badly carved? Was our sculptor less talented than those who were hewn out by some heavenly Michelangelo? Were we cursed by genetics and by the inability of nature to stay close to its perfect moulds?

Our lady of the fractals has no opinion on this. She has never declared herself beautiful – it is beyond the limits of her vanity to entertain such a thought. Beauty is incapable of defining itself – its one abiding quality. And yet in the midst of a mathematical vortex, our lady of the fractals displays a beauty that is beyond equations. In all her glory, she defies the golden meanness of the mathematician.

Homage To Madelbrot (from the series Photosyntheticism)

Benoît Mandelbrot escaped the holocaust. He was born in Warsaw, into a Jewish Lithuanian family, that fled from Poland to France in 1936. He completed his education at the École Polytechnique in Paris, during the war, while the Nazis failed to notice his ethnicity. When the war was over he studied aeronautics at the  California Institute of Technology before returning to the University of Paris where he earned a Ph D in 1952.

Mandelbrot discovered, to the surprise of the world, that price changes in financial markets did not follow a Gaussian distribution, but preferred to play out in Lévy stable distributions with infinite variance. Turning his attention to the heavens, he explained why the sky is dark at night. He had already fallen into the fractal world, positing that the universe was fractally distributed and thus, even if no big bang had occurred, the night would necessarily be dark.

Mandelbrot had discovered a rich vein of mathematics, which seemed to display the whole geometry of nature. He invented the word “fractal” and gave is name to the most famous fractal of all, the Madelbrot Set. The photosyntheticized image above is a depiction of the Mandelbrot set reflected against itself 3 times using an autocoloring filter and technique.

Seth Joseph – A Clown Poem (from the series: Photosyntheticism)

Seth Joseph, born in London town,
A boy who knew not how to frown,
Though normal in most other ways,
Did not believe in Saturdays.

It’s also rumoured to be true
That Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays too;
All of these were days about
Which little Seth had serious doubt.

He also thought that months and years
Were things you wore behind your ears
And if a boy was brave and bold
That boy would grow more young, than old.

People said his strange belief
Would surely bring the child to grief
“But grief is not my cup of tea.
Grief is not for me”, said he.

He nearly came to grief one day,
When both his parents were away.
But grief will never tarry long,
And when he got there, grief was gone.