Every now and then I pick up a piece of white paper 1″ x 13″ that was handed out in our New Media class. I have since drawn a curvy inkline on one side just to make it more obvious and exciting. I have twisted it over once and brought the edges together to form the Mobius Strip, and if I’d had one of these to play with when I was a kid instead of a Barbie Doll or dropcloth to make an Indian tent, I’d probably be a philosopher or scientist today.
It’s endless. It’s endlessly fascinating. You keep your finger on one side of the strip, run it around and end up on the other side. If it were a path in life, it’s eternity while seeing both sides of the path. It’s fun, it’s inspiring, it’s irrationally rational.
It does remind me of something that bothered me for years that I finally asked someone about and received a credible answer. I’m a doodler, and one of my favorite doodles is just making an endless line that curves around and over itself many times, then meets at its starting point. Then I would color in alternating spaces–those that didn’t touch. It always came out in perfect checkerboard pattern. This bothered me. The answer supposedly is that the line actually represents a closed figure and that the crossing over each other of lines was bringing the outside into the inside or something like that.
With such complexities of life available in such simple things, who has time to create new ones? Or do new ones even exist? Most likely they are not new, just undiscovered or unanswered; or their purpose and intricacies has not yet been applied to all the aspects of life that they can be.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology