I completed a second equilateral triangle made of meter sticks. Each triangle takes several hours to fabricate: 30 sticks + 60 miter cuts + 294 drill holes + 147 decapitated 1¼” brads = an exercise in patience and mindfulness. So far, no glue; what holds it together is just the friction arising from my little carpentry imperfections — all conspicuously apparent against the rigid regularity of the millimeter scale. Were the nail-holes all perfectly aligned, the whole thing would fall to pieces.

Two more triangles to go. Each will be one face of a tetrahedron (four-sided pyramid). Final assembly will be very, very tricky. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the flaws-as-glue approach will work in three dimensions, too.

Why did I choose to build a tetrahedron? Because doing so raises some interesting questions. First of all, it’s the simplest of all the Platonic solids — the convex regular polyhedra. As such, it is arguably the most perfect and pure of all flat-surfaced solids. When it’s constructed from hand-fashioned materials, I wonder: Can such mathematical perfection be expressed using ragged and imperfect media? Can the idea of perfection even be conceived by an imperfect mind? Is it our familiar, unpolished edges that bind us together and keep us whole? Or are they simply the hallmark of all our unfinished interior work — all the obstructions and attachments that prevent us from knowing what the saint and the arahant know?

With so many holes to drill and so much shaping and fitting and tweaking, there’s plenty of time to muse on these things.

See also: Self-measuring tetrahedron.

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