Why (worldlings) do ye trust fraile honours dreams? And leane to guilted Glories which decay? Why doe yee toyle to registrate your Names On icie Pillars, which soone melt away? True Honour is not heere, that place it clames, Where blacke-brow'd Night doth not exile the Day, Nor no farre-shining Lamp dives in the Sea, But an eternall Sunne spreades lasting Beames: There it attendeth you, where spotlesse Bands Of Spirits, stand gazing on their Soveraigne Blisse, Where yeeres not hold it in their canckring hands, But who once noble, ever noble is. Looke home, lest hee your weakned Wit make thrall, Who Edens foolish Gardner earst made fall.
Scale after scale of you, Truth after truth of you peel to the core of truth, The white, hard center of realest life. Break the sheath and crack the shell, Find the kernel that springs to a greener leaf, A richer flower. Giving gifts to purchase peace, For acclaim, for the sake of conscience, Or to quiet the hour of death: seed leaves, Tear them off till you reach the core of giving, Giving to find your soul and perfect your soul. Love: the frayed and dusted scale of sex; Love of family: the lioness and her cubs; Love of your fellows: winning love for yourself— Tear all away to the monad crystal, yourself... Love that burns for the truth of love, Love a star, not a moon!
—
—
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.