Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Permutations of Seven
Originally posted on October 3, 2013
Permutation is a good word. It invites you to sensuously enter into the possibilities of the figure, to feel out how many ways it can play out. The word “permutation” invites my mind to cast loose of its bearings and float in a multi-dimensional space, making new connections, forming new “shapes” that really drift like clouds into yet more shapes, or fireworks morphing into new configurations.
Seven is also a good number for doing this, having a multiplicity of ways it can be drawn out. Thus, geometry is far more than the extension of arithmetic as taught in school In fact, the construction of simple designs is often not even taught! Play with these figures and see where they take you. (I confess my mandalas fail in their exactitude, and I don’t care. They are meant to be suggestive to you, and to empower you to play, not to get it “right.”)
Seven is just enough to have some complexity but just few enough to be easily played with. I always feel like odd-numbered polygons have a sense of dissonance in a synaesthesic way. An octagon and a hexagon are like a C or G chord; a heptagon is like a… well, like a C-7th!