Shape

13 Answer Number Two—Three More Ways to Look at It That Tell a Story
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as a way into or maybe out of her eye. Making things so that you see what they mean is
harder than it looks. A lot of people have tried—the logical empiricist Otto Neurath is a
recent member of this group—but it hasn’t caught on. Nonetheless, the art is evident
in Ezra Pound’s eccentric enthusiasm for Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium for Poetry:
The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use
abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture
of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing
in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or
situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures.
Fenollosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC;
simply couldn’t help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of English type might very
well not stay poetic.
As a shape, bed is asymmetric, and as a word, it’s read from left to right. Still, I can’t
distinguish head and foot looking at it from the end or the side. The bed is firm, and
written in this way simply HAS TO STAY FIRM. I like to think that poets know that
nothing has to stay the same and take advantage of this. So a poet’s claim that something
does is pretty fantastic—pictures keep language poetic. I guess this makes poetry
visual. At least pictures and words connect up. But are pictures of things and their relations
shapes? What does
show as lines and planes? And there’s an added dimension, too. Four small triangles
make a pyramid with its apex or vanishing point where the diagonals cross—these
alternatives may distinguish Chinese and Renaissance perspective—and four large triangles
make a Necker-cube-like tetrahedron with its apex at either top corner of the
square. Try and resolve the right triangles now. Things (parts) and relations in shapes
aren’t set once and for all. Which way does bed go? Poetry doesn’t change—ambiguity
makes the difference.)
I can calculate in design without saying much about designing. To begin with,
I can analyze designs in a variety of ways. For example, I can look at their physical
performance in mathematical models, or I can ‘‘rationalize’’ them—divide them up
into components that I can manufacture and assemble. But analysis isn’t the only
use for calculating in design. I can be more synthetic. I can try functions or parametric
representations to enhance my creativity. Equations define lines, curves, and surfaces
that are used in pictures, buildings, and many other things that are admired today.