Storm

Scientists have recently announced that bodies carry around with them auras, penumbras of dust, disease, all of which, I suppose, form a certain kind of starlight, so magnetism, gravity, the invisible energy grid of the universe, shape our destiny into fictions written by invisible facts.

Sculptures also have auras, penumbras, wind shadows, which sometimes are revealed by eddies, fractal gusts, electric storms.

When Mark di Suvero’s sculpture, Beethoven’s Quartet, was assembled by Mark and his crew, the air turned purple. It wasn’t just a sunset: the air was filled with actual particles which were themselves purple, photons that had picked up coloration from the sky and brought it down to earth in a swirl of prismatic droplets.

Another time, the filmmaker Djuna Zupancic stood in the freezing wind for hours while capturing a complete whiteout whirling around Mark’s sculpture, which can be seen on the Tippet Rise website: https://tippetrise.org/films/white-out-beethovens-quartet.

The miracles of particles, of which our bodies are composed, are sometimes written in the margins, in the offing, in the hidden boundaries just over the edge of the world. They are written on the blank canvas of a blizzard. Beethoven’s Quartet, its moebius strip revolving silently in that blizzard, is both engine and mirror of the cosmic energy that underlies our lives. Wind makes the Moebius strip revolve by its invisible hand, and the Moebius strip itself creates a space warp which twists through space, powered by the solar wind.

A Moebius strip is a strip that is bent, so it curves the way Einstein discovered the universe does. It is the same as cutting a strip of paper, twisting it, and taping it to itself. That twist means that if you draw a pencil line on it, and keep moving the paper, you will end where you began and meet the pencil line again. When you look at the strip, the pencil line will be on both sides of the paper, although you never lifted the pencil to move to the other side.

That is, you changed from one side of the paper to the other side while the pencil was flat on the table. Normally, you’d have to lift a pencil and turn the paper over to draw on the other side. But if you twist the paper, you create a kind of wormhole where you go from the first dimension (flatland), through the second dimension (height), and back to the first dimension, the flatland on the other side of the paper, the other side of your made-up world. You’ve space-traveled into another dimension without leaving the ground, because of the portal created by the simple twist in the paper.

If space is twisted, to apply the role model of the twisted sheet of paper, then we can use similar portals to go into the fourth dimension, time, and back into the three-dimensional world without leaving our own universe. The twist creates a wormhole. It seems impossible, but you have just seen the leap into another dimension by twisting a simple sheet of paper.

Interestingly, if you twist the strap which secures your surfboard to your car rack, it won’t hum when you drive.

Beethoven’s Quartet, spinning slowly, almost whited out by particles, becomes a blackboard, or a whiteboard, on which we write our lives, our dreams, in the cosmic swirl of the storm.

You can’t see the mechanics of the storm, the invisible gears that shape our lives. In the film Forbidden Planet, the monster of the id was seen only when infused with the energy of lasers on the stair of the rocketship.

Like overtones which can’t be heard, or gamma rays which can’t be seen, our monsters and our angels are illuminated only by the miracles, the accidents of gravity, the way iron filings are organized by magnetism, or the Northern Lights are shaped by gravity.

The tiny town inside a snow globe is framed in snow, in nature. Nature’s frame is itself a mirror, a tabula rasa, peopled with our imagination, left blank for us to fill in. We see ghosts in the snow, as we hear voices in the wind. Our imagination fills in the blanks. Maybe those voices are unreal, but so is music, created by drawing catgut across a wire and making frequencies in airwaves, pleasing sounds which we identify as music.

In Victorian England, people brought framed mirrors into the Yorkshire Dales, turned their backs on nature, and framed the desired view of the world in the mirror. This made nature more like a work of art, with an actual frame. The reflection framed in the mirror was like a painting, or “picturesque.” It was completely artificial, an illusion, as a movie is a more complex illusion created by computers and light rays and projected on a wall or a screen.

In Djuna’s film, the sculpture of Beethoven’s Quartet is projected on the white wall of a blizzard. The sculpture is framed in snow. In its border, in the storm, ghosts materialize, like the Northern Lights, fluctuations in the wind which make patterns in the snow, hallucinations which, if you’re in the Himalayas, sixty miles from anything, you might begin to see as people.

Ensamble’s Folds, ghost sculptures made of white cement carpeting, appear on the ground at Tippet Rise like dust devils or snow devils, fractal whirls of air, shadows in a blizzard materialized and come to stay. They people the earth with images that call up ghosts in the storm, the secret world of the invisible periphery that surrounds us. We are surrounded with invisible storms, which produce both monsters and saviors.