Nature’s colors and mathematical structures are fascinating. Why do the works of nature delight us so much?

I am watching a film, and I can hardly believe it is real. The film features a fish. Everything about the fish would be as normal and regular as can be, were it not for what it is up to. The fish – wait for it – is making art. The film focuses on the inconspicuous-looking male Torquigener albomaculosus. The animal’s small frame (several centimetres in length) makes me pathologically jealous, and careening towards a nervous breakdown. The little fish is making sculptures in the sea bed off the coast of Japan: energetically racking up sand, adding piles here and there and forming humps out of grains, until a mandala emerges. At the centre of the mandala, the little fish is keeping its nose to the grindstone, and the devil only knows what calculations are going on in the corners of its piscine mind. But whatever they are, they must be quick beyond comprehension: the sand snowball pressed into the seabed is being covered with fold after fold, and nook after cranny; symmetries multiply and uniqueness crystallizes. From the very beginning, the fish most likely senses this mandala will be like no other. A unique specimen; a single swing of the universe.

T