Sacred Geometries
When I give talks on awe, I begin with the definition that began this book: we feel awe in encountering vast mysteries that transcend our understanding of the world. Over the years, often a hand has risen, and this astute question soon followed: What about the awe we feel from the minuscule? When looking at a cell under a microscope? Or the sixty-eight Thorne miniature rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago, which portray domestic interiors from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries in astonishing detail, down to the light filling the rooms from outside, each within a two-by-two-foot space? Or the near microscopic brushstrokes of Jan van Eyck? These champions of small awe might then cite William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” or Walt Whitman’s spiritual homage to a blade of grass and cross their arms and raise their chins in defiance. They are onto something—microscopic awe.
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher archives microscopic awe. She has devoted many years to photographing the structure of bees’ eyes, their honeycomb constructions, blood cells, and the tissue of bone. It was her photos of her tears that moved me to reach out.
As a child in Minnesota, Rose-Lynn found awe in patterns of snowflakes, in the profusion of soft hairs on pussy willows, on school visits to a museum of science and industry, and in classes on quilts and mosaics. She sensed patterns. Relations. Deep, unifying structures. “Sacred geometries,” Rose-Lynn would repeatedly say, invoking the idea that there is transcendent, even spiritual, feeling found in seeing the deep geometric structures of the world. There are geometries of life patterns that we hear in the symbolic sounds of music and see in visual art.
When I visit Rose-Lynn in her home and studio in Sherman Oaks, California, her reverence for sacred geometries is on full display. On a table is a scattering of rocks of varied shapes and sizes; she grabs several and points out timeless patterns, visual stories of awe about the Earth’s geological evolution. On a dresser in the hallway sits a construction from her art school days, interconnected parallelograms creating a pyramid. From simple geometric forms emerges awe-inspiring complexity.
Rose-Lynn’s paintings from her thirties on her bedroom walls center upon “deconstructing the vanishing point” so notable in Renaissance painting, when the converging lines of a checkered floor in a cathedral or palace, for example, disappear. For Rose-Lynn, the vanishing point in her painting speaks to that which has no end, no content, even no existence. In hearing her say this, I appreciate how a visual technique in art can enable us to understand a big idea of awe: that beyond the dissolving self is expansion and infinity.
One day while setting up to work, Rose-Lynn found a dead bee on a windowsill. She placed it under a microscope and took photographs with a lens that captures the microscopic. This first series of photos is in her book Bee. She shows me a photo from this series, that of a bee’s eye. She then points to a photo of the luminous profusion of hexagons that comprise the honeycomb structure.
AWE!
She tells me: “There are patterns in nature beyond their physical form, and their deeper resonances make me sense a Golden Mean within us.” Rose-Lynn then riffs on the sacred geometry of the hexagon—it is in the Star of David, the shape of a cloud on Saturn, the Hagal rune from Nordic traditions, and our DNA. Art allows us to find awe in seeing the unifying geometries of life.
One day, Rose-Lynn received a call from the son of a man she had come to know when she was a student wandering Europe in the late 1970s. While in Paris, she had an acute flare-up of Gaucher disease, an inherited genetic disorder that caused deterioration in her hip bones, among other issues. (In Gaucher, an enzyme deficiency prevents the complete breakdown of certain cells, and instead causes them to accumulate in the spleen, liver, and bone, with serious consequences.) She caught a night train to Florence; by the time she arrived she could hardly walk. She dialed a phone number a friend had given her, and met Patrick, who fed her soup, hoisted her across a piazza so she could at least see Giotto’s frescoes and Michelangelo’s tomb, and got her into a hospital, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. When Patrick’s son called to say that he had died, she couldn’t stop the flow of tears.
So she placed her tears on slides and began photographing them. From more than one thousand photos, one hundred experiences are represented in her book The Topography of Tears. The first two are Tears of timeless reunion (in an expanding field) and Grief and gratitude. They look like aerial maps (for her, of her emotional terrain), abstract forms made up of systems of the body—veins, capillaries, nuclei. Other photos have captions like The irrefutable, In the end it didn’t matter, The brevity of time (out of order) losing you, and Tears of elation at a liminal moment.
Rose-Lynn explains: The lines, shapes, patterns, and movement of tears reveal the sacred geometry of her feeling. The images visualize what pain looks like. And gratitude. And grief. And awe. With more than thirty measures of our body’s physiology, scientists can vaguely point out profiles of twenty or so emotions. With her photography, Rose-Lynn enables us to see that hundreds of complex feelings have distinct neurochemical profiles revealed in the shape of tears. William James would have said Whoa.
In looking at Rose-Lynn’s photographs of tears of human emotion, I am transfixed by The pull between attachment and release, which is reproduced below. The lighter shape seems to be floating away, to my eye, from the first. Grief comes in fleeting waves of attachment and release.
Visual art also documents the geometries of our social lives: the symmetries of love between parent and child in depictions of Madonna and child by Raphael or da Vinci, or waves of collective effervescence in the drunken dinner scenes of the Dutch master Jan Steen, also found in room 837 of the Louvre. Sebastião Salgado’s photos of masses of wet, muscular bodies working in unison in Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine, which at its peak employed fifty thousand men, capture the sublime, hellish horrors of extraction-based capitalism, and how it reduces individual minds and bodies to means of production.
The pull between attachment and release. Rose-Lynn Fisher
Visual art also allows us to see the deep structures, or sacred geometries, of the natural world. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel described scientifically more than four thousand kinds of single-cell protozoa. Haeckel also believed that he could reveal scientific truths by drawing the species he studied, producing one hundred illustrations he would publish in a series of ten installments in Art Forms in Nature in 1904. This book has more than one hundred arresting renderings of jellyfish, sea anemones, clams, sand dollars, fish, and the occasional insect. Viewing his drawings is a strange and beautiful epiphany: the drawings reveal the signature qualities of each species in exaggerated artistic detail, allowing us to imagine how it adapted and survived in highly specific ways. In marveling at the symmetry and geometries shared by the species he drew, Haeckel enables the viewer to see the relatedness of different species, that the diverse forms that life takes are unified by a life force, or “artistic drive,” in Haeckel’s phrasing. His drawings allow us to see Darwin’s idea about the evolution of species from earlier, primordial forms.
Rose-Lynn shows me photographs from a more recent series, of ghostlike cells originally from a fragment of her own bone. They look like the sign for infinity—drifting and, to my eye, unaware of how they, the product of a simple genetic variation in one group of cells, can introduce complex pains, horrors, insights, and wonders into a human’s life. The geometries of all our lives, the traumas we have encountered, or the beauty, the curse you may feel running through your family’s history, and its blessings, are found in the shape of cells we cannot see and in random mutations of our DNA.