A few weeks before Hannah gave birth, we participated in one of the strange rituals of modern parenthood, one confined to the hippie-cum-brooklynite demographic: making a plaster cast of the pregnant belly. If David Brooks has not yet mocked this practice in an article or book, then he's not the conflicted pseudo-conservative I thought he was.
The process of making the belly cast was painful and annoying for Hannah, and lots of fun for me. When we were done we strung it with ribbon and hung on the wall of the nursery, where it remains today.
Recently, I've noticed Elliot staring at it. It took me a while to understand that he was staring at it because he was using the mirrors we mounted on his wall to do so. (Thankfully I managed to snap a photo, because the geometry is just too complex to describe. I had to hunch down and get behind his ear to figure it out myself.)
That white lump in the upper left of the photo is the plaster cast. And that white lump in the lower right is....well, you recognize him by now. (i spent a while considering that he might be looking at those dots on the wall, but extensive observation ruled that out.)
I don't really have any insight into why he likes to look at the belly cast. Plenty of armchair psychoanalysis is possible, of course. But I'm just here to record the phenomenon.
Your reluctance to describe the "...geometry that's just too complicated..." is appreciated here, as I've likewise fretted over describing the subtle relationships among the parts of abstract pictures I've written about. Yet I wonder, isn't this precisely the kind of challenge that an aspiring writer like yourself wants to meet head-on? (Re geometries, see DFW's essay on tennis in "A Supposedly Fun Thing...").
ReplyDeleteSir, you are correct. Normally when I employ a lazy trope to avoid the heavy lifting of the craft, I also deploy various auxiliary distraction techniques to force the reader's attention away from said gambit. In the event, lack of key 4th dimensional resources made such a multi-pronged, multi-layered approach unfeasible, so I opted for a charm offensive. My strategy was to admit my lack of any strategy. But cheerfully and with a knowing, conspiratorial tone, thus inviting the reader to consider the possibility that an author with such confidence and charm might actually have had the wherewithal to land the dismount on such a complex geometric description despite the fact that he did not actually &c. &c. &c. The long bomb, as it were. No one calls a guy ugly who just said he was ugly.
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