Granularity

July 31 2015

Too close, and all I see

are subtle tones
and brush-strokes

and heavy impasto.

The canvas weave

bleeding through

the neutral undercoat.

I feel my eyes converge

vision blur.

Unknown worlds

I cannot resolve.

The fine grain

that gets finer and finer;

orders of magnitude, all the way down.

Or step back, and back again.

The big picture

in its gilded frame

on a plain beige wall.

In an airy room

in a glass-enclosed gallery.

On a minor planet

around an average sun

in a typical spiral galaxy.

The artist

has rendered a tropical sea,

stock-still

in its infinitesimally thin

slice of time.

And I am a grain of sand

on a vast sweep

of virgin beach.

Tide encroaches, surf climbs,

the crash of waves

the smell of brine.

And in my mind's eye

the long before

and certain after.

The primordial rock

that was ground down

to fine brown sand.

And in the fullness of time

will be swamped

and washed away.

The water planet, monochrome blue,

set against

the black canvas

of deep space.

I find myself returning to this imagery and theme: the idea of orders of magnitude as parallel universes, mutually oblivious. We comfortably inhabit ours, and find it impossible to wrap our heads around the microscopic and sub-atomic, the inter-galactic and infinitely large. Here, the perspective applies not only to space, but time as well. I wanted to verbally whip-saw the reader, microscoping in and telescoping out.

A recently popular -- and inevitably over-used -- expression has been "granularity": meaning to focus in and see the fine grain of things, the fundamentals. In the poem, I take the metaphor and use it literally. So granularity becomes an actual grain of sand. And the centre-piece is an actual painting, which disappears into a blur as you get too close; and then disappears into insignificance as you step away.

This is where, I'm afraid, my abiding nihilism enters the piece: the narrator is a puny speck of sand in an indifferent universe; the inevitable end is an insignificant death. And I guess the final stanza represents the ultimate annihilation of climate change and sea-level rise: the blue-and-green marble earth of that famous NASA photograph has turned monochrome blue. ...Or not. Because poems, of course, are not prescriptive and linear: the reader is free to understand it in any way she likes, and I keenly invite any and all idiosyncratic readings.

It's remarkable how much meaning the human mind can confer on a still image. So despite the moving image, 3-D technology, and immersive computer simulations, not only does the basic art of painting persist, but classic works are still just as loved and highly valued. In the poem, the viewer enters into the painting, and her imagination weaves a complete narrative from the single stop-action frame.

I'm amazed by the craft and virtuosity when I see a painting in close-up like this: how what seems to be a crude application of pigment resolves into something so life-like and fully realized as you step away, or as the camera pans back. I couldn't even begin to do what the most basic artist can. And my apparent expertise is just that -- apparent. I may have picked up specialized terms like impasto and undercoat; but really, the best I can do is crude stick figures in crayon!