I told a girl in my math class about fractals. And Katie, who understands numbers as much as I do, and art, significantly less, nodded, and smiled, and said, "OH, cool!" with her eyes wide and confused-but-pretending-to-be-interested way that she has. I smiled back at her, but stopped talking. Fractals. They're infinite mathematical patterns on an x-y axis, and no matter how much you zoom in on them, they always have some other shape you've never seen before. They're beautiful. And endlesss. they're always curving into their present shape and disappearing into minutia. Like C. S. Lewis says about God; further up and further in, the inside is bigger than the outside. Like they sing at church for Christmas, "Glorious Impossible."
Navigating the hallways at my school is like navigating fractals. They curve around in big, lazy loops, and tight, spiral staircases. Even the ground is not flat, the art department hallways ramp up and down, a nightmare for perpective drawing. It took an actual trip to the hallways to convince my dad that my skewed pen and ink was true to life.
I guess the creative writing class likes fractals too, because when they published their favorite peices in a spiral bound notebook, the fractals across the cover almost made up for the loud, tantrum-red all-caps title: "Creative Writing; 2007-2008." They were sitting on the floor, grumpy and abandoned. A post-it note above it, pasted to the white wall, was written in friendly, loopy handwriting, and read, "Free! Take one!"
I looked at the fractals. I considered the probably poor quality of the insides. I grimaced at the poor choice of font. I glanced at the hopeful post-it note. I rolled my eyes. I took a step away. But it had fractals on the cover. I scooped it up and put it in my bag.
I was right about the quality of writing. The opening story started with, "The forest was dark and the leaves rustled in the wind." Every story had a murder, or a lover, or the muder of a lover. All the characters were lonely, a few were delusional. One was haunted by a woman who had never been alive, another by a woman who was living still. Clumsy spirals instead of fractals.
A fractal has layers, and unexpected turns that bring unlikely elements together. I would like to write spirals that resemble fractals; glorious impossibles.
