The Shape of Arrival

I always love the shape circle, not for its roundness, but for its lack of corners. No fixed point to start from, none to end at. And so every point becomes available as one: a beginning, a start, an exit, all at once.

There is an all encompassing quality to the circle. The lack of a fixed point creates continuity, a constant flow, a constant motion. In motion with no corners, there is no distance, and no distance to cross means no time to cross it. When there is no time, all becomes one in this constant flux. One can be anything and everything.

Once a circle is formed, it does not close. It opens.

For me the best experience of the concept of circle was probably the 21st century museum of modern art in Kanazawa by SANAA.

A disc of glass, 112 metres wide, set into the city with no front and no back. There is no facade
to approach, no entrance to locate. One simply walks in from wherever one already is.

Inside, the plan is not a path but a field. Rooms are scattered across the circle like islands, and between them run corridors of glass that let the outside in from every angle. There is no correct order to move through them. No arrow on the floor. You drift the way water finds its own shape in a container, following curiosity rather than instruction.

At the centre, a pool you can walk beneath. Glass floor above, water suspended like a held breath. It is Leandro Erlich's piece, but really it is the building's own thought made visible: the middle of a circle holds nothing, and it is this nothing that everything else quietly moves around.

Once, on a lunch break, I stepped out mid-thought, mid-room, mid-nothing in particular. No door alarmed behind me. Only the paid exhibits asked for an ending. Everywhere else, no ticket demanded I finish what I started. And when I returned, the circle had not moved on without me. It simply let me back in, exactly where I had left off, as though I had never left at all.

Sometimes I think this is how we are made to see life. Student to working adult. Married life to parenthood. Young to old. We live it through the events that mark it, as though a life were a corridor too, with doors that close behind each stage before the next one opens.

But there is no real starting line for any of it. Society insists on one, a certain age for a certain phase, a moment you are meant to have arrived by. I never studied fatherhood before I became one. No one hands you the syllabus before the exam begins. Yet life moves easier when we put these lines aside and simply flow between its phases, the way one drifts through a room with no correct order to it.

I return to the museum sometimes without meaning to, in memory, on an ordinary afternoon, and find I am still standing in it. Perhaps that is what the circle actually teaches. Not that there is no beginning or end, but that we were never asked to find one.

TEXT AND IMAGES BY ANATOMY OF THINGS