Patterns of Patterns

Harry Worth’s reflection gag in a shop window – da Vinci’s L’Uomo Universalis. (F83)

Plant cells grow in a spiral fashion, new cells appearing as the stem turns through an angle, turning again and again, each time forming a new cell, each time through the same angle. Irrespective of scale (this is a dynamic pattern) the angle remains the same, as leaves arrange themselves optimally to catch the sunlight and seeds pack uniformly in the burgeoning seedhead. This common, creative angle is Phi cells per turn, or Phi turns per new cell. Phi is 1.618…. (F84)

“H. E. Huntley extrapolated from the golden section (a single line demonstrating the ratio Phi) a three-dimensional golden cuboid that is shaped quite like a brick.”

The Grid Book, Hannah B. Higgins

Robert Smithson’s signature work, Spiral Jetty, recently reappeared from beneath the waters of the Great Salt Lake. “Et in Utah ego”. If the walking cults develop beyond the cellular then this work, submerged or extant, will take on a greater significance for them.

Illustration – spirals in different forms… sheep’s horns, shells, geometrical…
Similar growth patterns to logarithmic plant spirals occur in snail shells and some sea shells and sheep horns. Although these Golden Section or Fibonacci spirals are different from logarithmic spirals they are almost indistinguishable in appearance.
“in the great majority of horns we have no difficulty in recognising a continuous logarithmic spiral, nor in correlating it with an unequal rate of growth (parallel to the axis) … the inequality maintaining a constant ratio as long as growth proceeds.”

On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson

The Milky Way or Via Lactea, our galaxy, is a barred, disc-like spiral galaxy. Our solar system sits on a spur of one of the spiral arms of The Milky Way, in the Local Fluff inside the Local Bubble.

Pattern for the development of the walking cells:

grow 1 unit, bend 1 unit
grow 2 units, bend 1 unit
grow 3 units, bend 1 unit
and so on…

The organic quality of this process lies not in the totalising form of an organising organism, but in the ‘turn’, the deflection which makes change and pattern possible through a banal repetition.

Mythogeography oscillates between banal repetition and the unevenness (F85) of the picturesque

“I be a comm’d a matter o’ aighteen miles to zee thicky theng caal’d a PEE – DES – TREE – UN; and aater aal, I only zeed a Mon a waalkin’!”

(F83) The English entertainer Harry Worth was a comedian without jokes. His ineffectual and accident-prone behaviour never quite reached a punchline. Bumbling above the abyss, a limited myth, humour deferred, the audience laughed in order to keep Worth in work. This is egalitarian comedy of the highest order. Worth is the comic model of mythogeography.

(F84) “Everybody gets hung up on the science part, which has nothing to do with it… they’re getting at us through the fiction!” Kevin Baggins in The Faculty (dir. Robert Rodriguez)

(F85) see wabi-sabi.