The Lopsided Manifesto

Some guiding principles

            Like me, Nora had been advised that she needed only a single mastectomy. When she told me that she had insisted on a double mastectomy for symmetry’s sake, I thought she was crazy for getting unnecessary surgery. I was thinking of her when I boasted to all and sundry that I would not mind being lopsided.

            I was wrong. Nora was right. I do mind being lopsided.

            Some day I’ll tell Nora that nature is on her side. What isn’t symmetrical? Trees? Symmetrical along two axes. Our bodies? Symmetrical enough that tiny deviations loom large. Chemistry? Equal and opposite reactions. Physics? Einstein’s theory of relativity focuses on symmetry. Every ego has its alter, every left has a right, every up has to go down, and no middle can exist without a beginning and an end. We want a breast on the right to match the breast on the left.

            We symmetrical creatures of a symmetrical world desire and expect symmetry. A beautiful woman is a symmetrical one. Catherine Deneuve, the great French beauty, has, I have read, a perfectly symmetrical face. We crave a higher symmetry: justice and equality. We want cause and effect, reward and punishment. We want reciprocity. I want two breasts.

            An army of academics agrees with Nora and me. Symmetry has been hailed as a universal principle that unites the arts and the sciences. Mathematicians and scientists have written books that aim to explain the wonders of symmetry to non-specialists like us. Hermann Weyl, a German mathematician, wrote one of the first of such books, a published version of four lectures he gave at Princeton University in February 1951. In the preface he neatly articulates his purpose.

I aim at two great things: on the one hand to display the great variety of applications of the principle of symmetry in the arts, in inorganic and organic nature, on the other hand to clarify step by step the philosophico-mathematical significance of the idea of symmetry.

Subsequent popularizers have largely shared Weyl’s aim. An anthology from the 90s holds that symmetry unifies the “two worlds” of the sciences and humanities. To prove their point, the editors collected articles from experts in many fields: mathematics, literature, music, art history, biology, and more. As long as the table of contents is, it should be longer. Where is the article on breasts?

              The symmetry I long for when I look at my torso is bilateral symmetry. That’s the same symmetry as a butterfly. It’s also the same symmetry that the Greeks aspired to. Classical ideals of beauty and harmony lie in that kind of symmetry. Bilateral symmetry is also necessary. Butterflies, like birds and airplanes, need wings of the same size in order to fly. If our legs were different lengths, we would walk in circles.

            As a living, breathing violation of a universal law, I do not challenge it. I confirm it. I see symmetry everywhere. The asymmetry I used to prefer? How could I have been so blind? Isn’t it obvious that it depends on symmetry? Off-center needs a center. I am a one without the other. I am the embodiment of one shoe dropping.

            Our longing for symmetry differs from a longing for progress or happiness or other merely human constructs. Symmetry is in our DNA. Symmetry is real the way happiness is not. Symmetry is as real as my unhappiness at being lopsided.

            On the other hand, there is an upside to being lopsided. Nowadays when I manage to look at my lopsided body in the mirror, I sometimes manage to laugh. My body is winking at me. The round side is the eye wide open and the other side is an eye squeezed shut. Wink. Wink. We’re in on the joke, my body and me. We see lopsidedness everywhere.

            Who doesn’t have a friend who has confided that one ear is larger than the other or one eye higher, or etc. The body is not symmetrical, as anyone who sells shoes will tell you. There are not a few men with only one testicle. Does any woman have identical breasts? Lopsided ears can hear, lopsided eyes can see, and walking does not depend on having identical feet. Men with one testicle procreate and breasts get all kinds of attention no matter what.

            So what if a bird’s wings are lopsided? They can still fly. Uneven legs still propel us forward. Everyone stumbles and staggers. Totter? Teeter? Wobble? Sway? There’s a reason there are so many words for being hopelessly, dangerously, absurdly off balance.

            The first recorded use of lopsided was in 1711. A boat was lopsided. More than 100 years later, a house in Dicken’s Bleak House was also lopsided. A lopsided house tilts; the lopsided boat leans. The lopsided versions of boat and house conjure up a motley crew for the boat and something similarly suspect in the house. Who says adjectives merely modify? That single adjective is the ruination of those nouns. Nobody wants to live in a lopsided house. You board a lopsided boat at your peril.

            Lopsided the adjective is just as lopsided as lopsidedness itself. It has no opposite. Balanced? Stable? Those are opposites of synonyms for lopsided. Symmetry wins out over lopsided even in its negation. Asymmetry! Like all great negatives, it emphasizes the positive. Asymmetry is A + symmetry – symmetry is being intensified not negated.

             Is it any wonder that symmetry has attracted such a dedicated host of theorists? Could anything be more rewarding to ponder than something so orderly, so neat, so tidy? Symmetry is, by definition, orderliness and tidiness itself! Symmetry is the strait and narrow.

             On the other hand, is symmetry a universal principle because it really is everywhere, or is it a universal principle because it is so universally pleasing? Symmetry is a universal principle that promises what it pleases: a well-ordered universe.

            Symmetry, say its acolytes, exists even if you can’t see it, and so symmetry is likened to the divine. Keep the faith, say the symmetrists, and you will be rewarded by seeing a great unity in all creation. The arts! The sciences! Symmetry dissolves their differences. The lion lies down with the lamb! The physicist and the English professor appear in the same anthology! We are all one in our allegiance to symmetry.

            Of course symmetry is universally liked! Look at its pedigree. Sym + metros. I don’t want to believe that etymology is destiny but if it isn’t why do words with Greek roots get all the love? Technology. Biology. Hegemony. Patriarchy. Oncology. Words with a lineage stretching back to ancient Greece define us; we don’t define them.

            But lopsided? Etymology uncertain. Maybe Middle English -- like muck and dump. Words with that kind of etymology are reserved for the shameful, the embarrassing, the crude, the let’s-not-talk about it. Lopsided is low on the lexical hierarchy. It is obscenity adjacent. It is a four-letter word in disguise.

             Lopsidedness is something to be fixed. It’s also inevitable.

             Symmetry is temporary. That Greek statue is not as perfect as it once was. Things chip and crack. They snap. Call it breakage. Call it decay. A mouse runs up the pendulum and sets it in motion. The earth wobbles on its axis. There’s erosion and mutation. Without lopsidedness, the world would stand still.

            Is there anything more universal than lopsidedness? So what if there are no theorists of the lopsided, no academic literature? So what if it’s ignored? Maybe that is the most universal thing about it. Most of us are ignored and the academic literature has nothing to say about us. We are the lumpen lopsided. Lopsided is the new black.

            In a lopsided world, I look in a mirror and I don’t like what I see. My body and I hear the sound of one shoe dropping.

Photo by Imani Bahati on Unsplash