Stop Making Sense

Let me explain

Sometimes conventional sense, the type of analysis and reasoning required by many of our jobs, can start to seem a bit boring, or wearing, or non-nurturing. Then down in the canal it turns out they are installing a temporary thing which consists of brightly colored steel triangles anchored with cables to cinder blocks, by artist Casey Cooper. As the water returns to the canal, the brightly colored steel triangles will float.

I attempted to explain this in words to my beloved, but as you might imagine words were not exactly sufficient to transmit this concept in a conventional, sensible way. The things look to me most like person-sized colored triangles made out of party balloon material sitting on cinder blocks, which is not exactly a phrase that the average post-workaday brain is prepared to wrap itself around without some extra mental calisthenics.  

Yet when you see it, your brain still shadow-firing with the patterns of conventional sense that have occupied it all day, your brain does a little flip-flop, and what was there is replaced at least for a time with a sense of wonder and not-explaining.

A sense which, I'm expecting, will be enhanced once the water returns and these things float. I loved Fausto Fernandez's Flowing Overlapping Gesture when it floated after the big storm. You remember, the tools and gears and stuff cut from foam which floated in and arched up and out of the water.

Maybe I'm not sure exactly why I love art that floats. Maybe my post-workaday brain is not sure why it does happy flip-flops when it perceives it. Maybe I should stop thinking about it so much and just stand next to the canal and allow my mind to float along with the brightly colored triangles. Although if an amur catfish shows up and starts singing, I may be inspired to run away on a long bicycle ride and join a stilt dancing troupe.  

By the way, orbifolds may be used to model musical triads. wrap your mind around that why dontcha: " for triads (three tones), this yields an orbifold that can be described as a triangular prism with the top and bottom triangular faces identified with a 120° twist (a ⅓ twist) – equivalently, as a solid torus in 3 dimensions with a cross-section an equilateral triangle and such a twist."