Mythical Mathical — Man-Horse!

Cover of Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric (1969), published by Corgi in 1972

That’s a striking cover — and more than that. The blog where I found the cover says this: “This very odd cover clearly features a heavily rouged glam rock centaur with a rather natty feather-cut hairstyle flexing his biceps, his forearms transmogrifying into miniature bicep flexing glam rock figures. I think I’m slowly losing the plot here.” Losing the plot? No, losing the mathematicality in the mythical. The artist has started to make the centaur into a fractal. Or rather, the artist has started to make more explicit what is already there in the human body. As I wrote in “Fingering the Frigit”:

Fingers are fractal. Where a tree has a trunk, branches and twigs, a human being has a torso, arms and fingers. And human beings move in fractal ways. We use our legs to move large distances, then reach out with our arms over smaller distances, then move our fingers over smaller distances still. We’re fractal beings, inside and out, brains and blood-vessels, fingers and toes.

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