27 JANUARY, 2012
By: Maria Popova
The mathematical poetics of time, or what matrices reveal about the matters of the heart.
Somewhere between the psychology of love and the intricacies of romance lies a vast and unmapped territory of abstract and subjective existential paradoxes. That’s precisely what New-York-based British photographer Julian Hibbard sets out to map in Schematics: A Love Story — a truly unique, in the most uncontrived sense of the word, project exploring love, memory, and time through 43 schematic diagrams drawn from old books and paired with poetic text that gleans new meaning from the geometric forms. From them emerges a layered and paradoxical narrative that is at once very personal and very universal, a kind of forlorn optimism about what it means to be human and to follow the heart’s sometimes purposeful, sometimes erratic, usually unpredictable will in pursuing the deepest of human connections.
I learnt to tie my shoes
I learnt to ride my bike
I learnt to smoke
I learnt the vulnerability of fully exposing an idea
I learnt to tie my shoes
I learnt to adapt my behavior in the light of others' actions.
I learnt the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.
I remember a French girl with an English name.
'Leave me now, return tonight,' she told me every morning, and I did.
I remember an English girl with an French name.
We were the circle that no one could break, or so I thought.
The book, whose own unusual, geometric, highly tactile physicality reflects its substance, begins with a beautiful T. S. Eliot quote:
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Yesterday I was there.
Today I am here.
The two are light years apart.
I dance with a friend,
holding her hand realize,
how disconnected I have become,
from the simple beauty of touch.
I return and sense,
that things are not the same as before,
but feel had I stayed,
everything would likely seem the same.
David LaRocca writes in the afterword-by-placement-introduction-by-purpose:
Schematics operates simultaneously on two distinctive registers: the deeply personal (a love story between the narrator and the objects of his affection, desire, and confusion) and the profoundly anonymous (a love story within matter — subject to gravity, magnetism, genetics, mechanics, electricity, and the space-time continuum.”
Your words touch me.
Your thoughts excite me.
I want to try all that.
Explore everything with you.
Alone.
All one.
If and but and maybe and whatever.
I hate those words.
Everything doesn't have to be perfect.
To idealize is also a form of suffering.
LaRocca concludes:
Schematics is a love story because love involves (tragically, incorrigibly, but also beautifully) a desire for something that continuously transforms. Love is painful because we want the object of love to change and to stay the same; love is a desire and a fiction that animates our greatest pleasures and our most profound sufferings. Love holds us to this life, keeps us faithful to it. Yet nothing can save us from our ultimate reentry into oblivion — the point at which no amount of consciousness or desire can preserve identity or the energies that we once called our own. Hibbard’s poetic concept-curating presents schematics that invite us to consider — alone and as ‘all one’ — the existential graphs that underwrite life, and take us out of it.”
Page images courtesy of Mark Batty Publisher
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The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics is a fantastic 1965 Academy Award winning short film based on the 1963 book of the same name by Norton Juster, best known as the creative genius behind The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the greatest children’s books with timeless philosophy for grown-ups. It was inspired by the Victorian novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions and tells the story of a straight line who falls in love with a dot. (Cue in last week’s Schematics, a love story in geometric diagrams.)
