Polyp and Perspective
She stood with her feet splayed wide at the front of the studio — a soft red shape in a sea of blue corners. In her hands were two normal bricks, roughly the same size, freshly dried. They looked like she had plucked them out of the Ithaca snow on her way to class.
“Everybody gather ‘round,” she said, gingerly placing the bricks next to each other on a table. “How many do you see?”
“Two,” said the punk in the checkered shirt.
“2,” said the girl with the sky-blue tank top.
Two, I thought from the back. That’s the beauty of it.
She looked around slowly, searching for something. “Anybody else?”
A greasy haired senior in the back slowly raised his hand, his uhs slurring into his answer.
“Why do you say three?” Her words were smooth but there was a spark in her stance.
The senior slouched out of his seat, “‘Cause the, uh, space in between the bricks is, like, the same size and shape of a brick, so …”
When you start making circuits, you start by learning about what’s there. A battery. A wire. A resistor (its stripes straight as a captain’s bars). A tiny red light blinking warmly in the dark. And then again, circling back to the start. You learn that batteries are packed full of chemicals and special metals that trade electrons with each other, you learn that those electrons will flow in copper but not through plastic. You learn that if you melt sand in just the right way you can fill it with lightning to make it glow. Slowly you learn more. You learn that you can use that same sand — silicon worn smooth by light — to shape storms (power electronics are mysterious and well … powerful), or listen to the tiny rhythms of a kitten’s heart. You learn that if you arrange it the right way, silicon can remember things, that if you arrange it the right way lightning will pulse along its etched paths in the shape of thoughts — in the shape of dreams.
Then when you start working, you learn that space is money. A few square inches of a circuit board can cost hundreds of dollars (if I want spares). A few square millimeters of silicon can cost tens of thousands. So you learn to fill space well, to weave your copper web so tightly and closely that there’re no gaps for your hard-earned money to slip through.
When I built my first computer, I opened the box for the case and grimaced. It was huge. It was going to be so hard to move from place to place. I sighed in resignation. I suppose you get what you pay for. And besides, I bought it for ease of installation, not looks. But I swore to myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Fast-forward to my junior year. I was working on a computer networking project, plucking WiFi packets out of the air and turning their metadata into music. I ran it off a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a lithium battery with some simple power circuitry, and lots of terrible terrible C code. I was going to wear it on my arm like a runner’s iPod and stream the sounds of the digital world straight through my skull into my ears with custom bone conducting headphones. It was a perfect system.
And I learned that sometimes what’s more important than what’s there, is what isn’t.
It turns out that computers get very hot. It turns out that I needed air and airflow and heatsinks cut into empty slices of aluminum that would wick the heat and sore red burns away (ouch by the by). It turned out that I probably should have taken those thermodynamics classes after all, should have taken at least one class that wasn’t just symbols on a page in a 2D simulation, one that would have taught me how to recognize that in the real world, things can take up space invisibly. Amplifiers and batteries and processors can sit so small and flat in their cases but they extend upwards and outwards on and on and on into the space around them that they need but don’t fill.
She smiled — as slightly as she ever did anyway — and nodded. I still couldn’t quite understand. She waved her arms around the two bricks, tracing shapes (jagged and angry, soft and sad) in the air.
“Good,” she said, “Here’s what I’d like you to remember: as a sculptor, you’re not just making forms, you’re designing a finite area of space.”
Afterwards I went up and talked to her. “Good lesson,” I said, and it was.
Or at least, it would be.
There is a word in Japanese, 間, or ma. You can say it means emptiness, or negative space, but it’s more than that. To me, ma is the way that spokes in a circle can come together at a hub, but it’s the space between them that gives it the essence of a wheel. It’s the time between two clapping hands. It’s the way that something only looks simple because what you can see only exists to shape and texture what you can’t. Introduction to Circuits might not teach you that, but RF electronics does, because if you don’t learn to space your traces a bug-eyed Finnish sailor will look at your board and wonder why he even bothered hiring you in the first place. I spend a lot of late nights nowadays hunched over a tiny crossbar of copper wrapped in plastic, soldering the right bits of ceramic to the metal in just the right places to shape the invisible energy winding through the spaces in between. The copper and the caps make the antenna, but it’s the E-field that gives the antenna its essence.
Somehow she could lie on her stomach and prop herself up on her elbows for hours, sipping her tea just right so she never swallowed a leaf. She would drink half now, and when her forgetfulness had cooled it down I would drink the dregs. Now she laid there with her back arched to breaking, her fingers poking at lines of Python, face flushed red under her enormous lenses.
I was on Reddit.
She made a quiet rumble in her throat; I had an awful amount of work to do, and I wasn’t doing any of it.
“Don’t you have a project meeting tomorrow?” Her forehead wrinkled as she wiped out a function and three hours of her life with a single keystroke. “I don’t think you should just be wasting time like that.” She put a bit of a lilt into that one. It had been a long day, a long week. A long month. A long year.
“I’m just taking a break,” I huffed. This was true. The context however, was that I had been taking a break for the last 4 hours. “I just want to relax for a while.”
The soft tapping of fingers on rubber stopped. “Then why don’t you talk to me?”
There were many things I would have liked to talk about.
I would have liked to stop right there, and walk with her out into the night. To go down by the river with our breath flaring like jasmine in the dark. To take off our glasses (hers massive, mine tinted blue) and pretend we were impressionist sketches of ourselves, rich and unreal. To wrap our minds in the wrongness of a city fast asleep and talk long into the evening about dreams of rain while the stars turned above us. I would have liked to talk about the colors I saw (imagined? hallucinated? dreamed?) in us, crosshatched red and cyan blue. I would have liked to sit with her and tell the tale of us, our lives once folded into each other’s with barely a wrinkle, now crackling with static at the seams.
Things I knew she would never do.
“It’s kind of hard,” I muttered.
She tilted her head with a soft whine. “What do you mean?” Lying side by side, you could hear our bones grinding against each other, almost snapping.
“Well, you don’t talk that much,” I looked at her, my hands traced cyan blue, “You’re kind of boring.” She flinched.
“Boring?”
I wanted her to shout, to slap me, to pick up her things and walk away.
I didn’t want her shrink into herself, her lips pursed, swallowing her words and her thoughts and her dreams.
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“What’s on your mind right now?” It was arrogant and cruel and felt right. Because for all my callousness I was here. I was complex. I was real. “Really, right now. Anything.”
“See?” I said, and we turned back to our screens silently.
But I would look back after we had split up, with radios and heat and sculpture swirling in my mind, and realize that she had said something after all.
My joke with my high-powered lawyer friend back home is that when neurotech burns to the ground and the American justice system collapses, we would go back home and open a bookstore together. It was a nice thought to have, to make space in my future for something other than engineering, for soft simple dreams. And for all the clutter of the bookstores we liked to visit when I was home for break, I always imagined our “Disillusionment Bookstore™” (the most overqualified bookstore in the world) to be sparse and warmly lit, patronized by a few loyal customers, just enough to keep us in business. It was a quiet, empty space embedded in the future that I could invite people into — where our thoughts could mesh together in the dark:
“You could run a cafe right next door”
“And we could share customers”
“Make pairings of books and drinks”
“Coffee and Saunders”
“Tea and Murakami”
“The cafe would have chalkboards”
“All over the walls, for the pairings”
“And sketches in different colors”
“We’d have big glass windows”
“So the sun would stream in”
“And everything would smell like paper”
“And leather and binding glue”
“You’d just hear the coffee steaming”
“And pages turning”
“The regulars would claim spots”
“Different puddles of sunlight”
“And some would let their coffee go cold”
“But wait until a book was warm”
“So they could smell it while they read”
“And we’d work there for the rest of our lives”
“Happily ~”
Life is all about slipping between spaces — from class to work, from home to friends’ places to lovers’ beds. Some spaces are cramped and full, others empty. Some are made for you, some you make yourself. The ones you make for yourself are the most important. It’s tempting to fill them up with thoughts and feelings, jam pack them with emotions, tidy them up until you have everything In Order™. For so long I wanted to fill in all the holes in my life, in my future, in my dreams, all because I thought it would make me happy.
But maybe, I’m thinking now, it’s good to have a little empty space. To leave your life open for unexpected things (and unexpected people) to fill it. Sometimes now, I say to myself that I feel empty inside with a smile. Life is strange like that.
And that’s all I could ever ask it to be ~
