Shape

162 II Seeing How It Works
and lowercase ones
and their rotations and reflections. These are fixed in the symmetry group of the shape.
All of its parts can be flipped and turned in eight ways
And I can go on and divide the shape in myriad myriads of other ways. There’s always
something new to see. Nothing stops me from changing my mind and doing whatever
seems useful. I can always start over and try whatever comes up. These additional parts
scarcely begin to show how easy it is to switch from division to division without
rhyme or reason. No semantics works all of the time. (Myriad myriads is a truly
fantastic number that defies actual counting. It’s one of Coleridge’s many poetic
inventions—changing a noun into an adjective—that look easy yet are hard to do.
And it’s a good example of the uncanny knack of artists and madmen—and sometimes,
children who don’t know any better—to see triangles and K’s after they draw
squares, and not to be bothered by it. I do the same trick every time I apply a rule to a