small worlds

[devi]

Popping in briefly from the spin cycle that is life at the moment to say: if you're in Oxford before the 6th of April, go check out the Small Worlds exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science - and thanks to ar_gemlad for pointing me at it. Hundreds of weird, beautiful, mesmerising images from their collection of microscope slides, with poems, animations and other stuff inspired by them. Glimpses of a strange land not far away. The poems have clunky moments, but just as many where they hit spots I'd never managed to articulate by myself in all my thinking about Big Things and Tiny Things these last six months or so.

From a poem called "The Voice of Scale":

I am the immensity not only of the sky
But of the vertiginous gap between immense and tiny;
I am the nebula's terror when it thinks of the atom.

Yes. YES! Exactly.

Comments

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

But not just "as above, so below", but actually "above==below". Like Feynman's madcap theory that every electron in the universe might be the same electron, zigzagging through time. Every view of the universe might be the same view, but from closer or further away. If I learned one thing from "Life of Pi", it's "talk as much rubbish as you like, as long as it makes for a better story".

You should watch Hungarian film "Hukkle" (Hiccup) if you ever get a chance by the way. It's a rural murder mystery without dialogue, seemingly told from the point of view of an alien eye incapable of discriminating between the humanly "important/unimportant". There are lots of extended shots of bees and frogs and things. I think you'd like it.