My role in the reader’s understanding of this story is to narrate and incite food for thought about the geometry of our thinking. Some paragraphs are left incomplete, and no in-depth explanations given. I imagined what would happen if I had an extensive amount of knowledge in a particular field and what would happen if I encountered a concept radical to this field of expertise, that would throw me into an existential crisis, force me to shift my mental model, question my assumptions, and become aware of my pre-existing knowledge in order to understand it. The story that you are about to read comes a year and a half and many rewrites after the first assignment I received as a graduate student at RISD: to create a fiction based on an object analysis of an item from the RISD Museum, the Nature Lab, or the Fleet Library. This story is an on-going investigation into non-linearity, creative writing, and analytical thinking—or, a search for the shape of thinking that can capture the way in which associations occur in the human mind.

To begin, I chose Buckminster Fuller's structure Six Part Push Pull Tensegrity (1979) from the RISD Museum. I chose this particular object because this is how I learned about RISD—I had previously watched  this video on the topic from the Synergetics + Morphology: Explorations into the Shapes of Nature Symposium held by the Synergetics Collaborative: The Philomorphs Group and the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab in 2007.

At first I imagined an interview between myself and Fuller, but as I was sitting in my room I noticed on my left was a copy of Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, on my right there was a copy of Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar, and in front of me I was writing about tensegrity, a structural principle in which a form maintains its stability through isolated components that are held in tension in such a way that they do not touch each other. In a flash, my mind blended together these three ways of thinking —Fuller's tensegrity structure, Borges's infinite array of hexagonal galleries that comprise his Library of Babel, and the contemplation of a single ocean wave from the first chapter of Mr. Palomar. The following is a thought experiment, more than a story.


It was the morning of May 23rd in the early 1980s when our character inspired by the mind of Buckminster Fuller read the sentence “more incredible than a celestial flower or the flower of a dream is the flower of the future, the unlikely flower whose atoms now occupy other spaces and have not yet been assembled” in H.G. Wells’s book The Time Machine. 1

Coincidentally or not, a few days later, in a random newspaper, my fictional character read that the same book is one of Jorge Luis Borges’s favorite books. Not being familiar with the work of the writer, the detail leads him to visit a library where he requests all the books that Borges wrote. The character is given Labyrinths in which he finds the short story “The Library of Babel” which has nothing to do with flowers, but rather with books placed in an infinite hexagonal close packing of space.

The character, like Buckminster Fuller, is already aware that hexagons in three dimensions, unlike spheres, can be packed without leaving any space in between. The character becomes curious about what a writer of short stories, like Borges, would know about the close packing of space in nature. The hexagonal close packing of space is the most efficient way of filling the maximum amount of identical cells in a limited space and can be found across scales in the natural world. 2

The character loves to follow unrelated signs because often they lead him to discoveries. The character is a fervent advocate of the fact that the universe speaks to us through signs, and among his multiple obsessions, this is his priority: to pay attention to the associations that appear in each moment. This is a moment that he will follow. He begins to decipher the signs. 

During the decipherment of signs, as he was walking the hallways of the library, the concept of a celestial flower reminded him of a flower he once read about, the Snake Gourd flower (Trichosanthes cucumerina). During the daytime, its petals are closed. During the nighttime its petals are open, always occupying a different place in space, always following different pathways of unfoldment, always the same flower, in a different configuration. Our character saw in the flower’s diurnal and nocturnal curling and uncurling the infinite possibilities in which space can configure itself. He also saw the space that has not yet been assembled. Something about the flower reminded him of a tensegrity structure, which he believed was the shape of the universe, not a hexagonal pattern.3

Did he associate the cyclical curling and uncurling of the fringed, long lace-like tendrils of the Snake Gourd flower with the continuous outward pushing and inward pulling of tensegrity?

Did he imagine that if observers would trace the flower’s outline, they would see a hexagon?

In the moment of perception, what was the unconscious association? 4

Across time, various seekers have given the Universe different shapes through their measurements. 5 Each seeker’s phenomenological world assigned a certain structure to the already existing structure of nature. What is meant here by “universe” is the cosmos itself—all existing matter and energy including its accelerated expansion. The shape is a concept, a category, a mental construct. This is a story about spatial thinking, the geometry of our thoughts, the shapes we assign to the external world in order to make sense of it.

Sitting in the library with the book opened in his hands, my fictional character started the decipherment process by extracting Borges’s precise statements from his story, an emphasis on the word “precise” because the change of one word can alter one’s perception of the Library.

“The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”

“The library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.”

“From any hexagon, one can see the floors above and below - one after another, endlessly.”6

As my character was walking in the hallways of the library, he spotted Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. He opened the book to the first chapter,“Reading a Wave,” and read about the reflective process of a fictional character trying to understand the composition of a wave:

“You cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates. These aspects vary constantly, so each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent or successive; in other words, there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time.” 7

And in my day-dreaming of how the fictional character would go about finding the answer to this challenge, and as I was pretending to be organizing some drawer full of documents, I found the following notes that Fuller wrote:  

“Universe does not have a shape. Do not waste your time, as man has been doing for ages, trying to think of a unit shape outside which there must be something or within which, at the center, there must be a smaller something.”

“All the words in the dictionary do not make one sentence; all the words cannot be simultaneously considered, yet each of these words is valid as a tool of communication; and some words combine in a structure of meaning.”8

[...]

“Do not waste your time looking for a singular unit shape.
  Shapes are just tools for communication.”9

In that specific drawer, I also found:

A photograph of Saturn’s hexagon, the compound eye of a dragonfly, soap bubbles, and honeycombs

A photograph of snapshots of different oceans’ waves breaking

A photograph of snapshots of a Snake Gourd flower (Trichosanthes pilosa) diurnal and nocturnal, curling and uncurling

A diagram of the anatomy of an ocean wave

A set of sketches of the proposed shapes of the universe

And a photograph of Kenneth Snelson's Needle Tower 10

Many questions emerge:

What is the function of the library, should the shape need to follow?

Why would a library be a tensegrity structure and not a hexagonal array?

Can we define what the “universe” means in order to give it a shape?

In the end, I believe that my fictional character should contact one of the philomorphs, a group of people who were constantly trying to understand the structure of things.11

The shape of the universe is the maintenance of pattern followed by the moments when its symmetry breaks.12