Figure and Ground

When I wrote the poem cotton hollow I wanted to deal with the concept of figure and ground: the object and the hole it forms within its container.

Think of a roadcase to carry a fragile instrument. You open the lid, and you see that most of the case is filled with plastic foam. The foam splits apart at the edges of the lid, and nestled in-between is the instrument. The space in the case is totally accounted for: it's either occupied by the instrument, or else the foam. There are no gaps to be found. Where there is instrument, there is no foam; where there is foam, there is no instrument.

If you think about the shape of the outer surface (the "skin") of the instrument and you think about the shape of the hole in the foam, you'll see that it's the same exact surface, just inside-out, in a sense. The instrument is the figure, the foam is the ground. (Or consider it from the viewpoint of the roadcase manufacturer: the foam is actually the figure, it's the instrument that is the ground.)

sunlight / leaves

Picture an empty field on a sunny day. The bare ground is uniformly illuminated with light. Now imagine a tree exists in the field. A shadow appears on the ground. There are not many leaves on the tree, so there are lots of gaps where the sun can shine through. The shadow has lots of little spots of light within the shadow of the tree. The little spots match up with the gaps between the leaves.

Now consider the sunlight. Most of the field is illuminated with light, but there are gaps where there is the shadow of the tree. The gaps in the sunlight match up with where the leaves and branches cast their shadows.

So there are two kinds of gaps here: the gaps between the leaves and the gaps in the sunlight. They are exactly opposites of each other: where is sun, there is no leaf; where is a leaf, there is no sun.

wind / body

Consider an empty field on a breezy day. The bare ground is unaffected by the wind. The wind is unaffected by the ground. Now imagine a person standing in the field. The wind is deflected around the body. And the body is pushed by the wind. The two interact.

It is not clear which is the cause and which is the effect: does the wind push the body, or does the body deflect the wind? The figure/ground idea doesn't apply here.

Where there is air, there is no body. Where there is the body, there is no air. Like the sun and the leaf, these are opposites: the body is completely contained within the air. Or to put it inside-out, the air completely surrounds the body.

water / stones

Like the wind and the body, the water must flow around the stones. Although the water pushes on the stones, they will not yield. In the timeframe of our perceptions, it is the stones that guide the water's flow.

Yet every passing second, the water wears away a tiny bit of the surface of the stones. In a geological timeframe, much longer than what we can experience, the water changes the shape of the stones.

It is not clear which is the cause and which is the effect: does the water change the stone, or does the stone change the water? Again, the idea of figure/ground idea doesn't apply here. Yet it seems that maybe somehow it does.

smoke rings / clear air

Now let's think about smoke rings. The main feature of a ring is that it goes around in a continuous loop with no breaks. And what it goes around, is the hole in the middle. In mathematics this is called a torus; an object of genus one. The "one" means it has one hole in it. (Also, for the purposes of analogy, I'd like to mention that the human body is topologically a torus.)

Imagine choosing a random path inside the ring. Think of it as a loop of string. It starts somewhere inside the ring, and wanders around a while, finally coming back to where we started from. Now let's shrink the length of the string. Two things might happen. Either you can shrink the string all the way down to zero, or you'll get stuck around the hole (maybe even wound around it a few times).

Now think about the air around the ring. What is the shape of the air? Maybe it would be easier to think about a roadcase again. Imagine a roadcase designed to hold a big ring. We can take a box, put a ring in it, and fill it with foam. The foam is just like the air around the ring. What is the shape of the foam? Well, I don't mean the outside shape of the foam (the shape of the box), I mean the shape of the hole in the foam that is holding the ring.

Think of the strings that we just shrank to zero in the ring. It's the same thing in the foam: they either shrink to zero, or they get stuck around the hole in the foam. Remember, the hole in the foam is the ring. The ring is filling the hole in the foam. (Likewise the foam is filling the hole in the ring!)

The hole in the foam is just like the hole in the ring. It's just inside out. The genus of the foam is one just like the genus of the ring.

This idea can be developed into a sculpture.

I am here / I am not here

"Be Here Now." "No matter where you go, there you are." My experience is 100% from the perspective of the figure. The rest of the world, the universe, is the ground. That's why it's so hard to imagine a time after I have died. From my viewpoint, suddenly there will be only the ground. The figure, and the surface between it and the ground, will be gone.

Figure and Ground the last image reminds me of Pink Floyd

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