Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 38
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humans can't figure out how to measure something that might be measurable doesn't mean that
the thing is automatically immeasurable and therefore infinite ... again, emotion may be the most
accurate way to gauge infinity. Outside of emotion, the concept of "infinity" often falls into the
terror of theory perverted by merciless binary insistence; however, art often expresses notions of
infinity through the emotional, aesthetic dialogue that happens between the artifact (poem,
painting, song) and the person appreciating the artifact. According to Huntley:
It is to the emotionally charged experiences of a thousand generations of our ancestors
that we must look in order to discover the sources of aesthetic pleasure in art, in poetry,
in music, in mathematics and in other artistic forms. It is not impossible to guess what
some of these experiences must be which, either because their repetition is so frequent or
because they evoke strong mental excitement, have left their indelible traces on our
mental structure; these traces are a fixed part of our human inheritance and the ground of
*46
our aesthetic appreciation.46
Just about every fish, bird, and mammal can be structurally likened to the palindrome: most
creatures can be split down the middle into symmetrical, reverse-ordered halves. Human beings
have been glimpsing this type of bilateral symmetry in nature ever since "glimpsing" became
something that human beings did, and if I'm the only person who finds symmetry to be
aesthetically pleasing, then I guess I stand alone, but I know that is not the case.
Another recursive structure, representation of infinity, and phenomenon that has pulled at
the strings of human aesthetic sensibility is the spiral- what I propose might be the cousin of the
palindrome, or maybe at least in the same family. In geometry, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, a spiral is a continuous curve traced by a point moving round a fixed point in the
same plane while steadily increasing (or diminishing) its distance from this point.47 Remember38
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McConnell, Michael Constantine. Outer Reaches of the Palindrome, thesis, December 2003; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4407/m1/41/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .