From solid repose

Above, folks, is a photograph of a sculpture by Franz Rudolf Knubel. But it also pictures, as we'll see, a basic musical principle, and acts, I want to suggest, as a concise summary of Cleo's first five years.

Knubel's sculpture is not especially well known, but it was given a certain prominence when it was discussed on page 435 of the 1974 edition of Rudolf Arnheim's influential Art and Visual Perception. Noting that the piece was designed on the basis of a suggestion by Theodor Fischer, Arnheim then went further: "The central block is a cube; the others have the ratios of elementary musical intervals: 2/1, 3/2, 5/4, 1/1, 4/5, 2/3, 1/2."

Interesting, right? But to a Gestalt theorist like Arnheim, this had specific consequences, and he wasted no time in spelling them out. "The similarity of shape," he wrote, "and the gradualness of the changes in height and width induce the viewer to see a coherent event of transformation rather than a sequence of independent shapes. The event is compellingly dynamic: the object contracts and rises, thereby changing its character from solid repose on the ground to towering strength."

I'll buy that. But I'll also up the ante. Just over years ago, I described taking a ten-month-old Cleo to a party that featured a number of similarly young children; one of them, I noted, had toppled over into a "resolutely horizontal position." And Cleo, in the accompanying picture, was hardly vertical herself; instead, she lay in a solid repose, in her mother's arms. Scroll through the blog, though, and soon you may feel as though you're doing something more than merely looking at single posts, in sequence. As Arnheim put it, rather, you may be induced to see a coherent event of transformation. And at the very end of it, the object of the blog will rise, changing her character from lolling baby to - well, if not quite towering strength, something nonetheless undeniably distinct: