A
young friend of ours from Portland, Zack, stayed at our house for
a couple of nights last week. He was in LA doing a photo shoot.
Always fascinated with unusual technology, he's now an expert at 360
degree and panoramic digital photography. I was showing him my first dorodango.
It's a Japanese art form. You take fine dirt - any kind of dirt - and
make a mud ball out of it with your hands. Then you dust the ball with
more fine dirt until it is dry to the touch, and then put it in a tight
plastic bag in the fridge for several hours. It sweats out moisture
onto its surface, which you dust and rub further till
the surface is dry. You repeat this process many times until the
dorodango is hard and stops sweating out moisture. Then you buff it out
with a cloth until it is shiny. A good dorodango will look like it's
been glazed and fired in a kiln - but it's nothing more than a ball of
dirt. My first dorodango has a bit of shine to it, but I want to
perfect my technique.
I showed Zack the progress of my second dorodango. This one is shaped like a pear, because I want it to be like a daruma doll.
This
is another Japanese tradition based on the legends around Bodhidharma, a
Buddhist sage who was said to have meditated so long in the lotus
position that his legs merged into his torso. The daruma doll is a
painted papier-mache pear-shaped figure. The inside bottom of the
doll has a weight that causes the doll to come upright if you knock it
over. The daruma doll is a reminder to stay "centered" - to maintain
equanimity of the soul through good times and bad times, through the ups
and downs of life.
My daruma dorodango won't stay centered,
because it doesn't have extra weight at the bottom. I pointed this out
to Zack as I showed him my work in progress. "You should make it in the
shape of a gomboc," he told me. He put me in front of a computer to
look at a video of a gomboc.
It's an object invented by Hungarian mathematicians who were on a quest
to see if a three-dimensional object could have just one unstable and
one stable point
of equilibrium. It's the only uniform-mass (non-weighted) solid object
that will right itself if tipped over. It looks very much like a steep
turtle shell - and that's no accident, because turtles otherwise would
have much more difficulty righting themselves when tipped over. Gombocs
must be machined with extraordinary precision in order to maintain
their "self-righting" quality. Invented only a few years ago, the
gomboc intrigues mathematicians, engineers, and designers who are just
beginning to find applications for it.
I
don't understand the
mathematics behind the gomboc. But my intuition suggests that
its shape has some kind of eternal, universal quality about it, as does
a sphere or a cube. In some way, it must be a shape that describes
gravity itself. It's a shape that represents, but also actually
embodies, one of the fundamental relationships forming the cosmos.
Perhaps
also it evokes the shape of the soul, tumbled about by this rough world
but created to right itself in relationship to its divine Source. Had
Bodhidharma lived long enough, and meditated deeply enough, perhaps his
body would have melted further into the shape of the gomboc. Then
the daruma doll would need no extra weight at the bottom to get it to
return to
"center"!
Perhaps
there is something like a gomboc at the center of who we are,
attracting us always toward equanimity: toward kindness in the midst of
anger, toward compassion in the midst of distress, toward calm in the
midst of chaos. If we can follow that tendency toward the center,
toward the heart of God, we can stay still while the world tumbles
around us.
"Mud,
when it leaves the mud, stops being mud." This "proverbio" by the
beloved poet of Argentina, Antonio Porchia, came to mind as I formed my
first dorodango. Perhaps that's just what happened when Gabor Domokos
and Peter Varkonyl produced the first gomboc. We rise above formless
chaos as we orient ourselves toward our cosmic Source, and then see more
clearly our true nature.