Fractal

A fish-shaped school of fish, each individual shaped like a single

scale on the larger fish: some truths are all a matter of scale,

in the manner that shale will flake into thin layers of and like itself,

or a roof is made of shingle upon shingle of roofish monad.

Scale, fish, school of fish . . . “That’s a fractal, isn’t it?” was your feedback when

you ate what I said. “A form that’s iterated: output is input

ad infinitum.” Must I now mull it over? I mulled it over.

This aquarium, I thought, was a sort of think tank for non-thinkers

in their open-mouthed safety-in-numbers forage, needing no courage.

Yet so beautiful: mathematically serving one end while swerving

in a fraction of a second into action: how do they sense when

to advance or back- track, tail that guy, or swallow the law to follow?

Somewhat in the line of Leibnitz, Mandelbrot coined the term fractal: it’s

the hall-of-mirrors parthenogenesis of a recursive, nonce,

anonymously irregular form: i.e., copies no other

formula can make. (I learned that when I got home.) An eye on either

side of a flat head is useful, I read; herring have a keen sense of hearing,

but it’s not that that gives them their unerring “high polarity,”

pooling together just close enough to discern skin on a neighbor,

far enough to skirt collision. That’s a vision scaled for fish—but what

human can marshal acceptance, much less a wish, for sight so partial?

“Stand back from the glass, make room for the universe,” I thought then; “at least

for whatever we can compass: iteration on iteration,

until fish fill the ocean.”