so it is the basic law of life

A friend recently sent this bit of text to me, and I had never encountered it before. As with all things mysterious about the brain and its functions, I was truly tickled by it:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,
it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a
wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The
rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed
it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn
mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a wlohe.

Ah, chaos. If only the mind could find a set of keys so easily in a disheveled room as it can read the above paragraph. I am struck by redundancy. I notice, when reading--for any reason, be it pleasure, a subway advertisement, or to edit--it is one of the first things I pick at. But, generally it appears to me on a less intricate level. Never so much to the letter, as it were. Having never been good at math, I find the fact that my brain is so good at structure--planning, dates, organization--odd. It seems to come from some unknown piece of myself, yet it is one of the first things people notice about me.

In any event, the trick to the above (though there really isn't one), is that a good reader is able to successfully comprehend the text as written because only the internal letters have been randomized. Essentially, there is a logic to the disorder (there is enough information for one who has some essential knowledge) the mind is able to reconstruct the information so that it makes sense; it can extract, deconstruct, and rebuild before you even realize it has done so.

And amid another twist of connections, this evening's conversation, that at some point turned to the events of September 11 (I may dare touch on the novels that have appeared recently about this date, but I am not certain I can do so without some personal regret for it), brought to mind the children's book Unbuilding by David Macaulay. Macaulay is a fascinating artist and author who is known for is intricate explorations of the mechanics of everyday things. Macaulay's work, though written for children, is extraordinarily complex. His line art is minute and exacting in its detail. He takes items, usually architectural in nature (though also the human form), and he explains their essential being. For him, the forms he examines must be deconstructed in order to be understood--order to chaos for comprehension. Unbuilding takes the Empire State Building and undoes it. Bolts and all; in specific sequence.

There is a spread in the book (and also on the cover) that is a view looking downtown from what appears to be about 40th Street. And the Twin Towers, in their linear certainty still stand. Later, in a similar spread, they are obscured by clouds, and the Empire State Building is half dissolved (and there is one last image of this at night). I remember having the random thought after the first tower fell that, it couldn't stay that way. They both had to fall. To have one and not the other, would have been some kind of cruel rearrangement.

To those of us
who don't always
appreciate things
until they're gone

[the dedication for Unbuilding, published 1980]