The Fugue
"True joy is a profound remembering, and true grief is the same.
Thus it was, when the dust storm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread out before him, he felt as though the few fragile moments of epiphany he'd tasted in his twenty-six years– tasted but always lost– were here redeemed and wed. He'd grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumour of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire.
It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die.
And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him."
Weaveworld,
Book Three:
Out of the
Empty Quarter
"The wheels of its body rolled,
the visible mathematics
of its essence turning on itself…."
For the meaning
of this picture, see
Geometry of the
4×4 Square.
For graphic designs
based on this geometry,
see Theme and Variations
and Diamond Theory.
For these designs in the
context of a Bach fugue,
see Timothy A. Smith's
essay (pdf) on
Fugue No. 21 in B-Flat Major
from Book II of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Smith also offers a
Shockwave movie
that uses diamond theory
to illustrate this fugue.