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If the tricks and conventions of perspective fail Thurber himself, what of lesser mortals like me?
I first saw many intriguing pictures that use these tricks of perspective in the delightful book by Y I Perelman. Never-ending up-down stairs with water-wheels, optical illusions, and a figure that seems at first sight like profiles of a couple on the brink of kissing each other but actually two closely placed lamp-stands.
There was also a famous painting with a mirror gone awry.
On my frequent visits to my mom's place at Gudur I used to have a hobby. To thwart thieves and beggars she installed a huge grill made of steel bars forming a lattice. When I used to sit in front of it and stare, for want of anything else to do, I used to see a lattice work of squares supporting by radial rods a central hole as the unit cell. And when I blink for a second and watch again, the same grill seemed to be a lattice of diamonds with arches around them. Both the unit cells were equally valid.
No wonder that the unique father-son duo of Braggs shared their early Nobels in X-ray crystallography. Getting the right 3-dimensional picture from a set of 2-dimensional photos is no joke. Even figuring out the Double Helix had won Nobels for Crick and Watson...no relatives of each other, I believe, nor of poor Rosalind who died early and so became ineligible in any case....there's a moral there.
Now of course computers must have made these things easy...I don't know.
Going from the physical to the intellectual, I go back to my childhood again. The walls of our home in Muthukur were plastered with pictures of umpteen gods and goddesses all of them having superhuman traits like four hands, three or more heads, heads with elephant trunks riding mice et al...after all gods must be different than men and women, some men and women at least.
We accepted all these oddities reverentially and unquestioningly....childhood imprinting is like that. When we visited the temple of, say, Hanuman and found him to be a monkey, we didn't grudge or grumble...he became our hero, a symbol of strength and devotion to his Lord. Same with goddess Laxmi standing, forever, on a lotus and shedding coins at her feet.
But one day Father took me to the temple of Shivjee. And since I saw his pictures with snakes around his neck and a concealed third eye, I was looking for an identical stone image. But I found only a Big Brother Bull whose tail we were asked to touch peering from between his ears to see Lord Shiv. But I could find only a cylindrical stone with a flange on which water was continually dripping from a vessel with a hole. And I asked Father what the meaning of it all was...and he kept quiet.
Some perspective is needed there to figure it out as the symbol of Creation (and Procreation) instead of his famed Destruction which would happen by and by when he opens his third eye soon enough on our politicos.
There was this delightful story in Chandamama in our school days. One son, far more inquisitive than me, told his father that all he saw in the temple was a stone...and was rebuked that it was a Shiv Ling and not any ordinary stone. And that night on the dining floor the boy got the usual white pebble in his plate of 'ration rice' mixed with dal. And he put it aside and was asked by his father what he was throwing away. And the kid was scared and said:
"A tiny Shiv Ling"
Father was explicit on the ten heads of Raavan alright. Those days there used to be ads for pain relievers showing how Raavanjee with his ten heads was suffering from ten-fold headaches in the first picture. And uses 'No Pain Balm' and then smiles radiantly in the second.
And I asked Father why this chap should have all of ten heads...a bit of an asymmetric figure. And he replied that the ten heads are not to be taken literally but metaphorically...he didn't use the word 'metaphor' alright...I was too young for it. But he said that it means that Raavan's strength was as the strength of ten...Father knew his Tennyson by heart:
Escalating to spiritual matters, the difference between a saint and sinner (like me) is said to be only a matter of perspective. The sage sees the same things as us. He eats the same things, smells the same things, and talks like anyone of us. Perhaps he marries and begets kids, like our Vedic sages Yagnyavalkya and Uddalaka. But, like our particle physicists he finds the universe filled with an all-embracing spirit, from the tiniest to the tremendous:
http://horizontalchange.com/wp-content/uploads/ButterflyEndState_thumb.png
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"The woman on top of the bookcase was originally designed to be a woman crouched on the top of a staircase, but since the tricks and conventions of perspective and planes sometimes fail me, the staircase assumed the shape of a bookcase and was finished as such, to the surprise and embarrassment of the first Mrs Harris, the present Mrs Harris, the visitor, Mr Harris and me. Before the New Yorker would print the drawing, they phoned me long distance to inquire whether the first Mrs Harris was alive or dead or stuffed. I replied that my taxidermist had advised me that you cannot stuff a woman, and that my physician had informed me that a dead lady cannot support herself on all fours. This meant, I said, that the first Mrs Harris was unquestionably alive."
...James Thurber
If the tricks and conventions of perspective fail Thurber himself, what of lesser mortals like me?
I first saw many intriguing pictures that use these tricks of perspective in the delightful book by Y I Perelman. Never-ending up-down stairs with water-wheels, optical illusions, and a figure that seems at first sight like profiles of a couple on the brink of kissing each other but actually two closely placed lamp-stands.
There was also a famous painting with a mirror gone awry.
On my frequent visits to my mom's place at Gudur I used to have a hobby. To thwart thieves and beggars she installed a huge grill made of steel bars forming a lattice. When I used to sit in front of it and stare, for want of anything else to do, I used to see a lattice work of squares supporting by radial rods a central hole as the unit cell. And when I blink for a second and watch again, the same grill seemed to be a lattice of diamonds with arches around them. Both the unit cells were equally valid.
No wonder that the unique father-son duo of Braggs shared their early Nobels in X-ray crystallography. Getting the right 3-dimensional picture from a set of 2-dimensional photos is no joke. Even figuring out the Double Helix had won Nobels for Crick and Watson...no relatives of each other, I believe, nor of poor Rosalind who died early and so became ineligible in any case....there's a moral there.
Now of course computers must have made these things easy...I don't know.
Going from the physical to the intellectual, I go back to my childhood again. The walls of our home in Muthukur were plastered with pictures of umpteen gods and goddesses all of them having superhuman traits like four hands, three or more heads, heads with elephant trunks riding mice et al...after all gods must be different than men and women, some men and women at least.
We accepted all these oddities reverentially and unquestioningly....childhood imprinting is like that. When we visited the temple of, say, Hanuman and found him to be a monkey, we didn't grudge or grumble...he became our hero, a symbol of strength and devotion to his Lord. Same with goddess Laxmi standing, forever, on a lotus and shedding coins at her feet.
But one day Father took me to the temple of Shivjee. And since I saw his pictures with snakes around his neck and a concealed third eye, I was looking for an identical stone image. But I found only a Big Brother Bull whose tail we were asked to touch peering from between his ears to see Lord Shiv. But I could find only a cylindrical stone with a flange on which water was continually dripping from a vessel with a hole. And I asked Father what the meaning of it all was...and he kept quiet.
Some perspective is needed there to figure it out as the symbol of Creation (and Procreation) instead of his famed Destruction which would happen by and by when he opens his third eye soon enough on our politicos.
There was this delightful story in Chandamama in our school days. One son, far more inquisitive than me, told his father that all he saw in the temple was a stone...and was rebuked that it was a Shiv Ling and not any ordinary stone. And that night on the dining floor the boy got the usual white pebble in his plate of 'ration rice' mixed with dal. And he put it aside and was asked by his father what he was throwing away. And the kid was scared and said:
"A tiny Shiv Ling"
Father was explicit on the ten heads of Raavan alright. Those days there used to be ads for pain relievers showing how Raavanjee with his ten heads was suffering from ten-fold headaches in the first picture. And uses 'No Pain Balm' and then smiles radiantly in the second.
And I asked Father why this chap should have all of ten heads...a bit of an asymmetric figure. And he replied that the ten heads are not to be taken literally but metaphorically...he didn't use the word 'metaphor' alright...I was too young for it. But he said that it means that Raavan's strength was as the strength of ten...Father knew his Tennyson by heart:
"My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure"
Raavan's heart was of course not as pure as Galahad's.
Escalating to spiritual matters, the difference between a saint and sinner (like me) is said to be only a matter of perspective. The sage sees the same things as us. He eats the same things, smells the same things, and talks like anyone of us. Perhaps he marries and begets kids, like our Vedic sages Yagnyavalkya and Uddalaka. But, like our particle physicists he finds the universe filled with an all-embracing spirit, from the tiniest to the tremendous:
anoraniyam mahato mahiyam
Ishani's favorite story which she asks me to repeat again and again is about the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. I stole it from Ramakrishna Paramahamsa:
This caterpillar was fed up with her ugly and earthbound existence and builds for herself a cocoon into which she enters and lives for weeks, all the time silently praying to become a winged beauty. And one day she flies away as this colorful butterfly:
http://horizontalchange.com/wp-content/uploads/ButterflyEndState_thumb.png
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