Nesting Dolls

Dec 10 2015

Closer and closer, the eye constricts.

As I peer down, layer-by-layer

  ...our house

                    ...our room

                                      ...our bed.

Cocooned

in that warm dark space,

burrowing-in

to thickly jumbled quilts.

Like lenses, clicking into place

my field of vision fills;

stop-by-stop, penetrating deeper.

Nature, repeating herself,

  ...organ

                  ...cell

                                 ...molecule

the smaller I get.

The chemistry of life

so compact, and complex,

fold together

like nesting dolls.

I am dreaming now;

slipping through the porous threads

wafting through walls.

Gravity is blind

distance times-out.

A blue-green pendant

against the black

steadily shrinking away;

an ecliptic of planets, a point of light

receding into space.

Where, skin-on-skin, we nest,

body heat, and stale air

a glowing blush of sweat.

Both contained

and infinite;

travelling together,

then off our separate ways.

The poem zooms in and out through many orders of magnitude. I want to convey both a sense of insignificance in a vast indifferent universe, and a sense of magnificence at the privilege of comprehending its extremes. We complacently occupy the plane of our existence as if in blinders, but are really like nesting dolls: there are layers within layers, and we are merely one.

I think two things brought this to mind. One was a recent New Yorker cartoon: two ants are in a field gazing up at the night sky, and one comments on how "it makes you realize how insignificant you really are". What a witty reproach to our lack of humility; our conceit that we, in the here and the now, are at the centre of the universe. The other was glancing out my picture window and seeing the dog-house nestled against the edge of the much larger shed: their roof-lines complimenting each other, their outer walls over-lapping. And as my mind's eye, from its vantage point high above, moved from there to me, I realized I was looking down at something analogous -- cells within cells, repeating themselves; a house, a room, a man, reclining in his chair. And so the poem begins: eye constricting, peering down layer by layer; and with each iteration, its field of vision is filled.

And like nesting dolls, as well, we get close but do not touch. Which is the other theme of the poem: the tension between solitude and togetherness; the impossibility of truly knowing another. I think this comes from the inner life of the narrator, who is in the almost hallucinogenic space of his own head. So as close as he is to his partner physically, he still remains essential inaccessible. We live in our heads; and no one else can ever get all the way in. Writers try, and good writing comes close. But even language at its best -- our only medium of abstract thought -- is imperfect.

In the end, after all that movement -- from the subatomic to outer space, from dreaming to wakefulness -- the poem returns to where it begins: in the same warm intimate space, the same cozy little cell. (And if you're really interested, Gravity is blind/ distance times-out is a reference to Einstein's general theory of relativity; except that here, in the dreamscape of the human imagination, there are no rules, and so the space-time continuum doesn't apply.)