Figure 1 – The black-hole that is the center of the universe, (c) DE Wolf 2016, IPhone photograph.

It was very grey today, and I found myself looking for the sort of quirky images you find by looking with heightened perception at ordinary things. So I came upon a modern basket in a shop and fell in love with the evident spiral and deep three-dimensionality. It is a spiral or a vortex, and for me these little whorl-winds conjure up two associations. The first is the warp of a black-hole in the fabric of the universe, the gravitational field of its space-time. And the second is more intimate. Some of the native American of the American Southwest believe that your soul enters and leaves your body at the finger tips, where it forms the little spirals that we mundanely call fingerprints. This, of course, is ultimately the image of God reaching out to Adam in Michelangelo’s “Sistine Chapel,” the scene of the creation of Adam. Such is the universality of human myth.