Geometry

If René Descartes had stopped after his cogito, posterity would have had the benefit of his genius without the burden of his prolixity. As it happened, he kept on, and a consequence Western civilization inherited not just ontological security, but a lot of footnotes and a Mind-Body dualism which continues to rankle as the fundamental division of modern man. Not that I blame the box-faced Mr. D: with a mug like that, who wouldn't try to set a little distance between la chair and l'homme?

Even without going to the extreme lengths of becoming a polymath of surpassing genius, however, it's not hard to see why sequestering the Self from the accidents of organic form makes a certain sense: the human body is weird. We look at our toes, stiff, stumpy, helpless as newborn mice, or the elephant skin on the back of our elbows, or the tufts of hair sprouting like tundra grass from our ears (perhaps I should speak for myself) and we wonder how it can possibly be that the entity perceived by passersby has any relation to these accidents of carbon based biological bonding. Mind-body duality emerges as a natural response to the basic absurdity of biological expression.

Of course, there is absurd and there is absurd. Absurd as I find my own body (I find it hard not to compare it find all sorts of marmasets and cockatooes and three-toed sloths crawling around below the surface), I must confess that I find Benjamin's packaging truly ridiculous. His foot is as thick as it is long, with soft, shiny skin, translucent nails, and a big toe that curls like a pig's tail. His hair is a field of barley after the harvest, sparse golden stalks protruding forlorn and alone. His cheeks are silicon implants, his fingers are small albino traffic cones, his brows furrow with the smooth, expressive fluidity of the managing director, and his legs are the drooping, cellulite-splotched appendages of an aging cheeseweib.

Babies allow you to reconsider some long held prejudices about human texture and geometry. Perhaps because you spend a long time looking at them, you begin to observe the strangeness of their component parts, start to extend this strangeness to yourself. Round, smooth surfaces giving way to rough, bristled surfaces giving way to slack, wrinkled surfaces: the progression of organism, the evolution of human texture. I suppose no stage is intrinsically stranger than any other, but they all conjure up the basic dissonance of being a thinking creature in a physical body, beg questions about the relation between spirit and geometry, form and function. Perhaps it is not surprising that the man who embodies the Mind-Body split is also the originator of analytic geometry.