All that we have, while we live, is life; and if you don't live during your life, you are a piece of dung. And work is life, and life is lived in work unless you're a wage-slave. While a wage-slave works, he leaves life aside and stands there a piece of dung.
Men should refuse to be lifelessly at work. Men should refuse to be heaps of wage-earning dung. Men should refuse to work at all, as wage-slaves. Men should demand to work for themselves, of themselves, and put their life in it. For if a man has no life in his work, he is mostly a heap of dung.
Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it, For that your seife ye dayly such doe see: but the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit, and vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me. For all the rest, how euer fayre it be, shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew: but onely that is permanent and free from frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew That is true beautie: that doth argue you to be diuine and borne of heauenly seed: deriu’d from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true and perfect beauty did at first proceed. He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made, all other fayre lyke flowers vntymely fade.
—
—
0:00
0:00
Track 1
How this picture is made
What a fractal is
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.
How the boundary is drawn
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
What the branching signifies
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.