An Infinite Surface

A Happy Hippie by Maruša Sagadin

Published by Spector Books

ISBN: 978-3-95905-517-8

An Infinite Surface.

Our lover was stepping onto a bus. The 8a in London. He was on his way home after visiting us on a Sunday morning. We affectionately called Sunday mornings our ‘communion’ (we knew these meetings all year round, from the crisp budding sounds of spring through to the swaddle of the winter rain). He was a kind, well lived-in man in his sixties – comfortable, relaxed and neat. He had three apparent interests that shone through from our first meeting: a great passion for classical music, words and drawing.

He was an old-school architect by trade. For him, drawing was an important part of visualising future objects and a tool for rendering experience and place. His drawings often rested calmly on his kitchen table, overlooked by a wall of CDs in the adjoining room. His music collection took up a whole wall of his apartment, holding up the ceiling like an army of guardians. 

Sometimes we would lay in bed and Karl, with his ability to retain jokes and alliteration, would run us through the latest he’d come across. He was full of affectionate glee and had a playful and intelligent way with words. He could slip and twist language, causing sudden shocks, deeper realisations and laughter. In these moments, we were all simply people. No great affiliations, no fixed abodes as such, no great entanglements with our personal histories, no great engagements with our hopes for the future. In this space, the idea of our individual egos felt distant and beside the point; we were all just there together, experiencing the same permeable moment. 

This way of ‘Being’ remained completely in relation to our past and future realities; however, the situation also acted as a platform – it felt weirdly akin to a process of levitation or thinning. A thinning of the self. Letting the air into the ‘important self’ so as to yield so thin that we each became a kind of reflexive surface of other things. Like how the T-1000 in Terminator 2 could spread its liquid self across an expanse before suddenly, in an apparent act of empathic-knowing becoming replicant and seemingly integral with the object that was, moments ago, completely foreign. There is a thin-ness that seems important to knowledge, a depth somehow derived from this drifting loss of weight. Could this be what surface is? 

Can surface become a shared plane for people to take part in? Between the three of us, our perceived removal somehow generated a connection to a vantage point that let us see into the moment around us. A way of seeing that was focused yet simultaneously dispersed.

This apparent yet atomised apophenia has a more expansive power than looking into the distance from a single fixed position. A self that harnesses various logics of distance can be exceptionally close to a chorus of surfaces, leaving a cubist-like understanding of reality, where every surface is so close that it can be nothing but in contact with you. And this can be truly expansive. 

Take the Armillaria ostoyae fungus, for example. Visibly, gatherings of fungi burst through the forest soil, huddling around tree trunks and decomposing logs, all pressed up against each other with their textures so real. Invisibly, expansive underground mycorrhizal networks stretch for thousands of acres in a vast, interconnected web. The bits we get to see are, in fact, merely the network’s fruiting bodies. But the true, full self is incorporated into the mycorrhizal fabric, which is interlaced through the other living organisms, mineral particles and organic materials that make up the soil. 

To attain both ways of seeing – to understand the visible and the invisible, to simultaneously visualise what’s above the surface and what’s below – is, to me, where beauty sleeps. This perception creates a hyper-awareness of the true extent of things and relates to the proximity of nowness generated by an apparent form.

It was no surprise to us that Karl was a lover of music. Music also gives access to these kinds of multi-fractal ways of seeing. A simple chord can evoke a complex succession of thoughts and feelings. The sound of a dyad (two notes played concurrently)can be devastating. A moment of intersection, struck into being on the keys of a piano, can expand into a myriad of potential. It’s pretty amazing, actually. 

Worth thinking about. 

Worth stopping for. 

Worth forgetting for. 

Worth remembering for. 

Worth imagining for. 

It has a value of its own, greater than anything a qualitative discussion could even begin to attribute to it. This chorus of multiple elements can lead to insights into the physicality of complex emotion, or that which facilitates emotion. Music creates a space for form to take shape within and is a clear example of how form in any language becomes reflexive to us. While we have a shared acceptance of the typical carriers of art, these are also fleeting spaces, and they retreat like waves. 

Art can linger in us like music. Although we generally leave the location in which we experience an art-moment, its trace can remain within us at a higher resolution than the original moment itself. In this way, we see how truly plastic surface and form can be, as our sense of what might constitute ‘now’ is contorted through a relationship akin to a space-time continuum. Past experiences can touch the present with as much or even greater energy. This brings the notion of repetition or ‘again’ as a descriptor under scrutiny, as multiple encounters with the same object are never the same. 

In a way, art and music can be envisioned as Klein bottles, those topological objects whose interior and exterior are locked into an endless tide – all form and surface at the same time. Art and music display this fluidity in the way that they move between the in-and-out of real-time-experience and internally held memory. It feels important here to embrace a sense of equivalence between various forms, as they are all carriers of language and all have access to equality, if we want them too. This way of framing or understanding forms bestows upon them a sense of agency and helps give them a quality of wholeness. I find this approach rebalances our relationship with forms. They don’t touch us on demand, rather, perhaps, they give us permission to touch them – revealing an important lesson on the elements of communication, whether it be art, language, music or whatever. Once we accept that form – as the carrier of communication – is more expansive and eloquent than we yet understand, then maybe we can touch form in a way that embraces a notion of its agency and a shared equivalence. And perhaps it is in this moment of equivalence and agency that we get to see the true beauty of the Armillaria ostoyae’s fruiting bodies.

To me, surface is the human ‘touch-level’ to the deeper ‘thingness’ of objects. This ‘touch’ can happen with our mind, eyes, ears or any other sense. In this mode of thinking, I am always most excited when an object’s surface lets me see its insides too, when the surface deeply connects to the facts of the object’s existence. 

* * *

Karl’s right foot connected with the lip of the bus. At first, it was all about the rubber of his shoe and the aluminium of the bus, but then, just as quickly as this bursting dyad dominated, it gave way to a muddled pool of sensational melodies, all rolled-out and man-made synthetics. His hand clutched at a vacuum-moulded protrusion before he shifted his grasp to a plastic-encased steel pole, the full shank of his weight extending to the fastening as a pivot, which slid his body into the nest of the seat. The seat was designed to make you feel encased in your own space, even though you were often dangerously close to a member of the unknown public. 

All around him, language was being spoken. Nothing seemingly significant – just verbal communication in all its lingering variations. Everything surrounded Karl the way air gathers around trees in a forest. The typical specifics of everyday speech quietly receded into the mesh of background noise, allowing new details and depths of proximity to rise to the foreground.

Every time the doors jerked open, the world of the street flooded into the bus. The bus-capsule’s low frequencies joined with the outside world’s high frequencies to create a full spectrum of sound once more. Them and him, again? Surface and porous traverser. Like a schoolboy minding a seat for a friend, his right arm was rigid as a pole between his hand and shoulder on the vacant seat next to him, forming a ballast to fix his left ear against the pane of sound as it leapt through the open doors. Ballast. He – or rather his body – was the ballast that tethered him (his conceptual self) to these experiences. 

The doors snapped closed again, swallowing the high frequencies. Now, he swam once more in the synthetic pool full of chatter and low swirling sounds. Soon enough, though, the doors would open again, the bright colours would rush in to greet him, his ears would brush against them, and he’d understand a little about them from the parts he could hear and the stories they carried with them.

Look at those hands.

Her hands. (They were, he assumes, her hands, although he hadn’t seen her face as he’d entered the bus.) In fact, he didn’t recall that there was a person right in front of him as he’d found a place to sit (although it’s likely he is sitting herebecause she was already sitting there). 

The hands were bound behind her head, with her fingers interlocked in a zipper-like formation which made her hands into one unified bowl. This posture reminded him of the way businessmen were portrayed in American films from the 90’s – leaning confidently back in their chairs with their feet slung over their desks. He wasn’t reading arrogance in the form of these hands, though. They were merely performing a functional task with an outcome in form.

Her hands though.

He was fixated on her hands now, not just noticing them. They had an even complexion across their field of skin, although her knuckles bore a slight loss of colour associated with a degree of pressure or strain. Although, her grip seemed to be without any negative tension – the lift in tone was just a fact of the muscles and bones taking part in the bind. If this form of the hands was not affected by human intent, then it simply reflected its own meaning. The hands weren’t indicating a tension that we might project onto them; they just contained the required amount of pressure necessary to maintain their bind. The tension was simply a mechanism towards their goal. 

Creeks of cool blue blood lingered behind the thin skin. All skin is like this in a way – it barely holds us in. Maybe the blue creeks of the veins were the bits that shone through for us to see, and this cool blue swam like a sea deeply beneath the surface. No bones, just infinitely deep bodies filled with pools of thick blue blood. Neither scary nor terrifying but glorious on account of the story they shared at the surface. In the same way as sound holds its moist tongue in our ear, the interior of a form licks at the surface so that we can hear it’s there.

This coolness is important, he thought, because the hands looked warm. This warmth was not in contrast to the coolness but in unison with it. In this way, to understand the warmth, you needed to understand how the coolness and the warmth are integral parts of each other, not opposites. You needed to embrace these impossible possibilities. He liked that. The warmth in the form of these hands was because they held in them, without conflict, these creeks of cool; they were objects of coexistence that allowed the gentle moment of the cradle to take place for the woman’s head…

I think we liked the fact that Karl took the bus after meeting with us. Was it the thought that something you value extends beyond yourself? Or was it more the idea that the platform we walked together had an extension that continued on without us? Perhaps it was also that Karl could observe the woman’s hands, and, like a soft-mouthed-hound, bring them back to us. Describe them to us. Our interactions were, in fact, a kind of infinite surface upon which our subconscious minds projected our three-dimensional understanding into a four-dimensional space. Evoking an idea of surface that functioned as an expanding and boundless depth, where people and objects could achieve an equivalence through the disintegration between surface and form. This was a place where surface could be held inside form.

* * *

We expect, perhaps, that objects are forms with surfaces-on-the-outside, with their interiors locked away from us. It would then be fair to understand that the light reflected off an object’s surface indicates the volume of its form. However, an object’s volume or depth doesn’t have to be a receding phenomenon; it can extend in any direction from an object, with the light not only bouncing back to us but refracting within the idea of form itself. 

If we want a world of equality and equal things, then perhaps light doesn’t have to function in servitude, solely articulating the qualities of a surface – it can be equal to surface and form. Once freed, light as the illustrator of our vision achieves an equivalence of movement in relation to all things. I’m trying to think of an atomised reality that is more liquid than water, more dispersed than gas, a kind of hyper-equivalence in which we can take part... 

We can, if we want, cast away personal mythos and become perceptive nodes, absorbing the qualities of an expanding depth. Surface can be boundless data and all things can expansively reflect the qualities of each other.

‘Pure data’, he says. 

‘Pure data?’

‘After humanity comes the age of pure data’, he says. 

‘Oh’.

A refreshing consequence of welcoming the expanse of limitless form is the awareness of our scale as tiny in relation to all other things. This realisation generates a constellation-like view, where everything is inside form, even form itself. Everything is then a particle, if you like, connected in the same event that made that cool blue blood. As we are essentially particles ourselves and have the potential to become part of a system (rather than remaining outside observers), we can participate in this multi-directional understanding of what form actually is: an integrated system of ebb and flow that boundlessly ignites meaning by drawing in tethered yet impermanent surfaces residing within a fractal of plastic equality. A true reflexive form. 

Paul Knight 2021