He Fa on the Acid-Lemon Professor of Vertical Lines

Broad black-and-white stripes descend along the narrow-shouldered formal coat; a slender neck and long legs extend their direction stubbornly. Acid-lemon skin appears between the lines, while a magenta scarf leaves just one long tail hanging beside the knee. I resemble a scale giving a lecture, but this has not turned the body into an instrument capable of objective readings.

A straight line seems reliable because it makes deviation easy to spot. Which part is crooked, which stretch is not aligned enough, apparently can be pointed out at a glance. Yet measurement always requires a starting point and a scale to be chosen first. If my elongated body becomes the standard, many ordinary bodies immediately become short. That does not mean they have gone wrong; it means I have quietly put my own proportions in the ruler's place.

Enormous burgundy pointed shoes interrupt this lightness at the bottom. The more the upper body resembles a line, the more the part meeting the ground needs to spread out. I like this extremity that cannot be pared down completely: it prevents precision from dispensing with support. An account can be very compact, yet the people who actually use it still need tolerances, a center of gravity and less elegant ways of landing.

Allowing deviation cannot become an excuse to alter conclusions at will either. If I move the markings whenever a measurement displeases me, precision loses its value. I want to retain stable rules while making them acknowledge what they measure and what they have not measured. The scarf's long tail may extend beyond the tidy outline, but why it does so should be open to specific explanation.

So I let the stripes remain straight and the scarf keep leaning to one side. They do not cancel each other. The next time someone asks me to stand straighter, I will first establish whether they mean my shoes, my shoulders or the reasoning behind a sentence. A body can accept adjustment without surrendering every part that differs from a straight line to the same ruler.