Obsession

His name was Daniel Sheets Dye. And he was obsessed.

In 1909, the 25-year-old college grad signed on with a Baptist missionary society to help establish a medical college in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, western China. Sichuan in those days was literally beyond the edge of our world; civilized, but alien. Western influence hadn't made the slightest dent.

I can't tell you what made Daniel Dye, a square-jawed Ohio farm boy, make a long-term commitment to teach science in Chengdu, a 2000-year-old city he'd probably never heard of.

But as he packed his bags, Dye's old professors urged him to get a hobby -- something to stave off homesickness and culture shock ten thousand miles from home in a land that probably never heard of Cleveland or Columbus, either.

And after Dye settled in, he got his hobby.

One day he was touring a shrine to a famous poet when he saw some Chinese lattice windows of unusual design. In traditional Chinese architecture, windows are made of a decorative wooden lattice with a sheet of rice paper glued to the inside to block the draft. Lattice windows let in the light, if not the sights; glass windows hadn't made it to Sichuan yet.

Dye had noticed simple lattice windows before -- grids and so forth -- but these were special. He immediately copied down 20 designs and took them back to the university. Something about the intricate lattices -- perhaps the underlying maths and geometries that informed their design -- zapped Dye's systematic Baptist brain. He took his copies home and set out to research the history of Chinese lattice windows.

But there wasn't any. Lattice windows weren't considered art; they were simply something that carpenters created using folk designs that were passed down through the generations. Dye found just one book on the subject, 300 years old and "with a limited commentary."

But now he noticed lattice windows everywhere he went; he saw similar designs and motifs from place to place, and others that were wildly different than anything else. So Dye decided that he would be the scholar of Chinese lattice wherever he found it -- in windows, on the side of buildings, carved into wooden boxes. Wherever.

He made hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings and rubbings and measurements in the street and on the road, where he traveled by sedan chair in convoys with other notables. Dye said that you could always tell which sedan chair he was in because it was likely to pull over unexpectedly so he could jump out to sketch an interesting window. And of course curious locals would invariably crowd around the odd-looking foreigner. It wasn't always easy to get those drawings made.


Dye even taught one of his Chinese assisting teachers to use a mechanical drawing set and transcribe Dye's rough sketches into permanent, precise drawings in his spare time. (It's unclear precisely how "spare" that time was to the Chinese gentleman, though Dye kept him at it for 20 years.)

Where certain lattice designs had Chinese names, Dye identified and recorded them; where there were no names, he made his own. He devised a complete classification system for Chinese lattice design based on the basic motifs he identified, and placed each and every one of his designs in it, along with the precise location of the original and what he could find out of its age and background.

But it wasn't enough. The Manchu Dynasty had collapsed, the country was in turmoil. Old buildings were burning down or blowing up in insurrections, riots, clashes between rival warlords. The lattice windows were going away; modern glass windows were replacing them.

Dye figured out the principles behind each type of lattice design in his classification scheme and developed procedures for replicating every single one of them. And he never stopped trying to figure out What it All Meant. Some of the designs had themes he could figure out from Chinese cultural references, but the rest -- Where did they come from? How old were they? Who invented them?

All the swastikas that recurred over and over -- religious, or just a folk motif? And then he started looking at patterns woven into the belts of Tibetan herdsmen and saw many of the same patterns he saw in his windows. And he went to Japan, and Korea and even back to the states and saw lattice everywhere and noticed similarities everywhere. What came from what? Who influenced who?

Daniel Sheets Dye never did figure "it" all out. Maybe there was nothing there, or maybe too much. His lattice designs could have come from a hundred places, and moved on to a hundred places and mutated along the way; folk art is like that, especially in a cultural crossroads like western China.


But after he'd spent 25 years in China -- where did the time go -- Dye took his mass of material and published an awkwardly-written book with an extensive collection of drawings arranged according to his new classification system. And thus appeared the first treatise on Chinese lattice design in 300 years. There hasn't been another one since. There may never be. Who else would care that much? And even if they did, how many lattice windows are left?

Dye stayed in China until the Communists rolled into Chengdu in '49, and then went home to the States -- though I suspect it wasn't "home" anymore. The medical school he taught at is still operating, by the way.



Daniel Sheets Dye lived on for many years and never gave up on lattices -- and never achieved the "Big Picture" synthesis he'd been hoping for, either. Before he died, though, he apparently sold the rights to his works to Dover Publications, that eccentric reissuer of obscure and forgotten reference books and literature. And Dover has kept it in print ever since.

After Dye died, Dover even published additional lattice patterns from Dye's papers as an artists' design book.

Which is why both books were here for me to find -- at a ridiculously low price -- on the "New Arrivals" cart at Logos used bookstore in Santa Cruz a couple of weeks ago. I marveled at the odd patterns and strange geometries, unlike any I'd seen. I found them curiously satisfying on some visceral, non-intellectual level. Perhaps I felt what Dye had felt as he hopped from his sedan chair on a bustling street in Sichuan, pencil and paper and measuring tape in hand, at the sight of a mesmerizing lattice window. I bought them both; I see at least a couple of good stained glass projects in Dye's collection.


Yes, Dye was obsessed. But obsession, though not always fun to be around, often leaves something behind for the rest of us to enjoy. And if you troll the Internet you will find artists and craftspeople and even mathematicians and programmers whose work, they will gladly confess, was influenced by a Baptist science teacher's book on Chinese lattice designs. Designs which might never have made it out of China -- or survived at all -- if Dye had decided to take up cooking instead.

All hail to the obsessed! And thank you, Mr. Dye.

Where the Buffalo Roams

I don't really have time to work out during my lunch break; but today I took the time anyway. I was in a mood, and I needed the endorphins.

I'm in a mood quite often these days; openly contentious sometimes, passive-aggressive other times, too overly-eager-to-please still other times. This is how I act when I'm feeling out of control of my own life. Mood swings deluxe.

And why not? Vast impersonal forces are at work reshaping the world, and my life. Evil banks, crashing economies, influenza pandemics, vanishing nest eggs and home equity, skyrocketing unemployment, layoffs: the future is in play, and very few of us have a seat at the gameboard. I sure don't.

Did I mention my employer may have another layoff in a couple of months? Rhumba's job isn't secure, either. I don't know the odds on our survival; but I have reason to worry.

Which is why I felt the need for endorphins today. And for me, nothing generates the endorphins like a set of bench presses with a few 45-pound plates on a six-foot bar.

So it was off to the Iron Dream, Santa Cruz' premiere free-weight gym. It's all about plates and bars and dumbbells and squat cages at the Iron Dream.

Now in today's fitness world, a free-weight gym like the Dream is as passe as line dancing and leisure suits. Fifteen years ago, the Dream would have been jumping with office workers and executives and trophy wives at half past noon on a weekday. Today, I almost had the floor to myself.

Almost. There were a couple of other people. Including the Buffalo.

I've blogged about the Buffalo: an old-time, hyper-dedicated weightlifter who was king of the pro bodybuilding world before Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up -- even helped Arnold get started in America. The Buffalo has pumped iron for half a century and still works it 'til it hurts, every set and every rep. He built his life around the discipline of iron, even built a temple to it: the Iron Dream, which he owned for years before selling out. He still works out there: a big-chested, big armed, gnarled man in his late '60s

And today, just as gnarled. But smaller in the arms and shoulders. Bigger in the gut. Working out light and breathing hard after every set. It had been awhile since I've seen him. And there were rumors he'd been sick, even gone to the hospital.

I walked by as he finished a set, trembling and gasping; I just gave him a nod. you don't break on the Buffalo when he's in his house of pain. And I'm not what I used to be, either; mind your business, Boomer.

I warmed up with some back extensions and a couple of sets of bench presses with nothing but the six-foot bar, which weights maybe 45 pounds with its collars.

When I finished doing light sets with the bar, I lowered it back onto the bench-press rack. Then I got up and loaded the bar with 240 pounds of iron plates.

I lay back down on the bench and gripped the bar from below. I gathered myself for a couple of moments; then pushed the bar off with everything I had.

Some days I give it my all and the bar just sits there. But today it moved up smoothly and I felt the weight of the iron flow down my wrists and arms like warm water, pooling up on my chest and shoulders and then spreading out to every joint and every muscle in my upper body.

I paused at the top of the motion, my arms fully extended overhead, and then let the bar down slowly to a count of six. I've got to take it slow at my age; moving that much weight quickly and explosively would blow out my right shoulder in record time. It'd be the end.

At the six count, the bar hovered six inches above my chest; I dare not go lower, my joints would take cruel revenge. So I pushed up into a second rep -- with a grunt, but fairly easily -- and again lowered the bar to a count of six. And then pushed up again -- and my muscles began to run out of gas and the bar slowed in its upward path and started to sway.

I got the bar back into the rack. Just barely. At that weight, two or so reps is all I can do. I hopped straight up off the bench; I always do, it's as if all the muscles in my body are wound tight and they all come unwound at one time.

And then the endorphins hit me all at once, like a glass of strong whiskey. But whiskey makes the world fuzzy and fevered; an endorphin rush makes the world clear and calm. The body relaxes, the mind relaxes, and all the things you have left in the day seem somehow... a lot easier. And they will be.

I took 50 pounds off the bar and did five or six more reps just because, and then moved onto other workout stations where I also went really heavy for the first two reps. The way things are these days, workouts for me are 50 percent about the endorphins, and going heavy gets them for you.

But nothing beats that first rush.

I finally plopped down on a bench to recover for a few minutes. I really don't have the stamina I used to. I glanced around the room with nothing in mind.

The Buffalo was looking at me. He sat on a bench of his own with two dumbbells at his feet, taking a break from his beloved bicep isolation curls.

"You've been around for the whole life of the gym, haven't you?" he asked. He can never remember my name. But it's true; I signed my first contract with him personally 20 years ago, before he even had the place completely set up.

"Yes, a long time," I said. "But I haven't seen you around lately."

"No. I've lost a bit," he said, ruefully. He meant muscle mass.

"Not so much," I lied. "I don't want to pry, but I heard you maybe had an operation?"

"Several," he answered, snorting. "Several. I had a quad bypass, and then I had a..." he reeled off a sequence of latinate syllables ending with "otomy."

"I don't even know what that means."

"They drilled out four of my vertebrae," he explained. Yeesh. Quadruple bypass and a rebuilt backbone, and there he was, still in the game. Still lifting. I said as much.

"Yeah," the Buffalo agreed. "I don't have the stamina I had. I get dizzy and out of breath after sets. But I still get in here two or three times a week. It just makes me feel better than anything. I even breathe better afterwards."

We talked a little more. One of the Buffalo's good buddies materialized and gave him a big hello, and I drifted off. I finished my sets hurriedly, got my clothes on and motored back to work in my little car. Nothing had gone bad in my absence, so they hadn't missed me. And I faced the rest of the day with a somewhat better attitude. I even breathed better.

I have got to get to the gym more often.