From Soot to Diamonds: The Search for Design

“I was born in 1941, so I cannot blame my ‘rage for order’ on the Depression. I’m a clean-desk man, certifiably neat, who orders the same thing every time he enters McDonald’s. Unlike my grandchildren, I enjoy stacking up blocks more than knocking them over. I line up my coins by value as I prepare to buy something from a vending machine, and I shuffle the cards at least seven times, as I’ve been taught, to insure a proper mix. Chinese food often leaves me hungry, probably because I miss the salad-salty-sweet pattern of a Western meal. Let’s face it: a fortune cookie is a poor substitute for a slice of cherry cheese cake.”—Skip Eisiminger

 Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Behind all agreement lies something amiss./All seeming accord cloaks a lurking abyss.” —Albert Einstein

“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.” —Albert Einstein

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris) —1/19/2015—I still hear my mother saying, “Skippa, please finish the mashed potatoes—I have to wash that bowl.”

“By whose order?” I mumbled through a mouthful of gravy and potatoes.

Seven decades later, when she was incapable of doing the dishes or the laundry, Dad, a retired colonel, took over and established a schedule, “On Tuesdays, I do the towels,” he wrote me. “On Saturdays, I do the sheets . . . .”

By that time, of course, I knew who gave the orders in that house.

When I started dating the German woman who would later become my wife, I thought I’d found some respite. That fond illusion lasted until her mother laundered my London Fog raincoat and shrank the poor thing two sizes. She felt terrible, of course, and said she’d make it up to me by roasting a chicken for Sunday dinner. As we ate, I was relieved to see that my girlfriend and I processed the bones about the same. Then I looked over at my mother-in-law’s plate and saw a neatly stacked pile resembling the sun-dried bones of a Capuchin ossuary.

Both my mother and mother-in-law had survived the Great Depression, and they often used the 1930s as a scapegoat for their curious disorders. But I’ve also known others in and out of the family who came through the 30s unscathed. One survivor, distantly related, reportedly “could swallow a steel ruler and excrete haywire.”

Haywire, as it turns out, has an interesting reputation: coiled neatly on a spool in the feed-and-seed store, it’s still haywire, though most of us (especially the non-farmers among us) think of it as a rusty rat’s nest. But the truth is, haywire around a bale of hay creates an orderly and manageable solid that can be heaved into a hayloft without breaking apart. More interesting to me is that while the wire is doing its work wrapped around a confusion of hay, the chaos is pushing back, preventing its restraints from “going haywire.” Thus chaos battles order, and vice versa.

I was born in 1941, so I cannot blame my “rage for order” on the Depression. I’m a clean-desk man, certifiably neat, who orders the same thing every time he enters McDonald’s. Unlike my grandchildren, I enjoy stacking up blocks more than knocking them over. I line up my coins by value as I prepare to buy something from a vending machine, and I shuffle the cards at least seven times, as I’ve been taught, to insure a proper mix. Chinese food often leaves me hungry, probably because I miss the salad-salty-sweet pattern of a Western meal. Let’s face it: a fortune cookie is a poor substitute for a slice of cherry cheese cake.

In the 12th century, Tau-Omega maps depicted the Mediterranean as a straight, horizontal line. From this line, the perpendicular Nile descends like a culvert from the middle of the sea on a planet resembling a hockey puck. Framing the “T” (tau), which trisects the world into continents, is the perfect circle (omega) of the Ocean. Though I cannot imagine Odysseus finding his way home with such a map, it is charming to Moderns as it cleans up the Middle East and leaves the Americas out of the mess. Equally attractive are a spotless sun, an uncratered moon, circular planetary orbits, and crystalline spheres to hold them all in place. Johannes Kepler was so disappointed with his discovery of elliptical orbits that he spent ten years trying to refute himself. I know the feeling: once I received that first “B” in college, I knew there was no way I’d ever be 4.0 again.

In a 3.0 world, where bedlam is often cubed, the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland is formed of 40,000 deftly interlocking basalt pillars. Moreover, plucked guitar strings form perfect sine waves; snow stops falling at -30 degrees F; and everything from the chambered nautilus to the Helix Nebula appears to have been designed by a Fibonacci mathematician.

I’m not sure one can infer a benevolent god from this evidence, but he, she, it, or they seems/seem to have the same appreciation for order that many humans have. Or so it seems. If nature is governed by some ineffable imperative, how does one account for the floods, tornados, and asteroids that occasionally punctuate the harmony of a day when the daffodils are in bloom? The answer seems to lie in attribution: my idea of order does not always coincide with Nature’s. While the golfer is cursing the lightning that seared his arm off while shaking his putter at a dark cloud, the farmer across the road is counting his blessings, knowing that the same bolt fixed some nitrogen in the soil.

One of my doodlings with Leonardo’s squared and circled “Vitruvian Man” reframes him in an equilateral triangle. Once posed to perfection, however, Leonardo’s ideal may think he’s “the paragon of animals” since no other beast fits those three forms the way he does. I know that salt crystals are born as perfect cubes, but I also know that while seven planets orbit the sun counter the clock, Venus thumbs her nose and spins merrily along in a clockwise direction. Moreover, every zebra mother has a different stripe pattern, cuttlefish can infinitely vary their skin texture, every Emperor penguin has its own call, and every dog has a unique smell and taste. These infinities don’t cause confusion; they prevent it.

The unwritten limits imposed by absolute zero and the speed of light prevent anything from getting too cold or hot, freezing all motion, as it were, or flying out of control. Unlike absolute zero, there is no recognized uppermost temperature, but given light’s finite speed, I’m assuming that no particle may be heated beyond the point that it flies off faster than 186,000 mps. Long before these two limits were known, Pythagoras had discovered the mathematics of the musical scale, and Archimedes had calculated pi with 99.9 percent accuracy. But the musical ratios and pi, eternal and infinite as they are, existed in the mind of God long before these Greek scientists gave them rough form. Some will object to “the mind of God” phrase but, since these rational limits and definitions existed long before humans, to say they are “natural limits” seems to miss the point that Nature is indifferent and ignorant while Athena is intelligence deified . . . although I’m not sure how much she cares.

Robert Frost questioned whether design governed things as small as spiders and flowers but, judging from the evidence above, I’m confident of a broad plan within which spiders and humans are free to act. Meanwhile, though, I sit at my keyboard with a Bible implying that pi equals 3.0 and Wikipedia saying that it’s infinitely random.