symbol
I am interested in this symbol.
See if you can stay with me on this. The bit that interests me is nothing mystical, transcendent or even symbolic, really. Well, not directly.
It’s more a mundane thought about geometry, what the actual shape can suggest if looked at in a certain way.
The omega symbol could be fashioned out of a straight line, one that has been bent around so the ends almost join, but then abruptly turn away from each other. As a straight line, before it is bent, the ends are very far apart, as far apart as they can be.
However, once bent around into the circular omega shape, the ends remain far apart – the full length of the line running around the curve – but are also now very close together, even while they point in opposite directions.
This is mildly (and delightfully) paradoxical: two poles that are simultaneously far apart and close together.
This all puts me in mind of things that are paradoxically poles apart, but close together. Of all such things, my favourite pairing is the following: design and discovery. Also known as making and finding. In practice these two verbs remain profoundly opposed, even while they are experienced as being almost the same. That is to say that the results of intending to make or find can be the same. The forced simultaneity of these two activities is central to my working belief. This belief underpins my method: I make in order to find, and search in order to create. One cannot avoid doing the former when one is doing the latter, and the converse is also true.