A Mind That Likes Patterns

“The Pattern Engine.” © Ian Springham. Original abstract expressionist painting by the author, created for Between The Cracks.

In an earlier piece I said I’d only noticed the connection, between mapping the stars as a child and mapping myself as an adult, while writing that piece. That wasn’t quite true. I’d just never followed the thread back far enough to see where it actually started.

I’m writing a memoir, Between The Cracks, structured around the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. In an earlier piece about a cardboard box and a barge full of stars, I wrote that I’d only worked out the connection between the two, a frightened child mapping an incomprehensible world onto the actual sky, a grown man doing something structurally identical with a different map decades later, while I was sitting down to write that particular piece. I stand by the feeling of that discovery. I no longer think it was accurate about the timing. The throughline goes back much further than I let on, and further back than I’d properly looked until now.

It starts at Christmas 1975, the first one in the household I’d just been placed with. My foster parents gave me Purnell’s Encyclopaedia of Science, a proper multi-volume thing, not a children’s primer. I don’t know if they understood what they were handing a seven-year-old who’d just been moved again, or…