Every time we take a step, we fall forward. Every time we understand something new, our inner world has to rebalance itself. The perpetual motion machine that is the world runs not on symmetry, but on asymmetry. Without asymmetry, nothing would move, nothing would change, and the machinery of the world would stop in place. Human beings create and enjoy symmetrical patterns, but even those, examined closely, reveal subtle asymmetries. If you’ve ever seen a photo made from mirror images of one side of a person’s face, you know how unnatural it looks. While we delight in the symmetry we see in the almost-symmetry of a lovely face or a finely formed structure, there is also great beauty and delight in something odd, strange, in disarray, dappled, wild, unmanaged. It wakes us up and shows us a kind of beauty and aliveness outside the limitations of our plans, routines, and expectations. The thing out of place has a beauty all its own, and the fearful symmetry of which Blake writes is not just a surface appearance, it is the awesome magnificence and grandeur of creation in all its wonderful asymmetry, moving and changing and glowing with existence itself, in an unending totality of a perfect symmetry beyond our understanding.
© 2023 Shanti Natania Grace
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The Tyger
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
– William Blake –
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Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins –
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Delight in Disorder
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
– Robert Herrick –
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Cartoon by Edward Frascino
