Geometry

In the beginning: the point of nothingness in which dwelt everything that could ever be, there too dwelt the capability for birth. The first birth was in essence, a birthing itself – a birthing of the first thing that could ever be: an origin. Then came the birth of geometry. Since the multiplication of singular matter into plurality, a connection has existed; a moment existing from thereon and continuing, multiplying at the same speed as the multiplication of matter. Since the first moment of connecting two points to make the first primitive shape: a line, this process has perpetuated in the same manner. Lines connect to other lines to make a form, that form gives meaning in a motion that all life has since striven to replicate. Thus, with the elegant expansion: the graceful birth of origin and all other matter, came the very first means to comprehending anything.

For millions of years, this means of comprehension went unnoticed by most matter. Each particle was adrift inside their own existence, and because matter was so very far apart, although each singularity was connected to another by lines, these lines were very rarely significant due to the space between them, thus shapes did not have much meaning. As the universe cooled with the growing space between particles, some matter began to understand the importance of geometry in regards to themselves, and naturally began to reach the particles of themselves out to the particles of another. This web of geometry, the interconnected particles that formed the universe, formed gravity in its primordial state through movement.

As this gravity grew, the lines between certain particles shortened, resulting in the formation of complex shapes, giving birth to complex matter. Thus, geometry birthed the meaning of substance. Substance which, for billions of years became dynamic, forming within each group of matter its own individual shapes that would eventually reach their lines to another group of matter, forming increasingly complex geometry in order to simulate perpetually the first conjunction between singularities to make something else. As a perpetuating process, the origins of life and all other matter are, at the basic level, a matter of geometry. We can observe in our universe the largely significant role geometry gives to shapes, matter and form.

Consider this in practice. As plants, we draw our lines to bring us closer to the sun. As birds, we sweep our obliques across the atmosphere, leaving an infinite array of shadows, forming patterns where our selves once filled. As fish, we dart from point to point in our underwater battle to escape forever the barrelling thunder of our sphere as predator; and as mountains, we hold our forms in seemingly steadfast solidarity, heaving and sighing with the movement of our shape.

As humans, we too replicate this first act of geometry. From the first birth of ourselves, the line drawn between singularity and multiplicity lies at the heart of our own complexity. We find shapes in the negative spaces, between limbs and fingers and heartbeats. At the birth of sight, we learn to trace lines between visible matter to the eye, from the eye to the cortex, the cortex to the receptor and then to the brain. Without knowing, we birth with our eyes the perception of geometry in our strangely centralised existence of consciousness.

As our shapes race towards life, we learn that geometry is at the heart of everything. Like the Christ of our childhood, planets hold their circular haloes of light on their poles, the arcs of light forming the most graceful shape nature knows. Our ribs form cages to keep safe the malleable shapes that keep us alive. The lines on heart-rate monitors give value to our life insofar as they remain the proof that we exist, just as the lines that form walls that when joined with collision strives to remove such proof. We learn that the spheres between people extend far beyond bodily interaction.

From the birth of comprehension of another’s being, lines between the points that make up ourselves begin to stretch to connect to the lines that form another. The young shapes we make are, at best, primitive, but it nevertheless gives value to the understanding of one outside our own consciousness. This form of geometry, the stretching to fill negative space of another with our own shapes is called love.

We learn love as children. The lines between parent and child reach further than the skin. Like ropes, they tie themselves around the small shape of a young heart. We trace the perforated lines that terrible love pricks into adolescent skin, and we find ourselves afraid, for the first time at twenty, of the danger that love and its corresponding geometry can bring.