Lenses: Language Brings New Perspectives

Lenses is an extraordinarily beautiful essay, especially in the highly creative way the image of the lens is used to create microcosms of living significance that experience very particular meanings and rhythms unique to the beings that exist within. This creates a feeling similar to watching a time-lapse transition between two paintings that are completely different yet seem to have a connection that seems inevitable. The subtle differences between how life is viewed and explored through two separate lens magnifications is a contemplative notion that is rarely thought about or mentioned. How language is adapted between these two environments allows us to see how perspectives easily change when we focus on a subject from different distances.

When we are viewing the world created by the microscope's radically detailed lens, we instantly gain a perspective of the universe inhabited by the various forms of normally invisible pond life as one of claustrophobia, fierce survival, highly restrictive boundaries of what separates life and death, and a sense of growing importance marking the reality of a life structure that the author, and most higher lifeforms in general, have no regard for. We reach a point of extreme intensity and frenzy with these minuscule organisms. The language seems almost fiery, angry, and vengeful throughout the view from this lens.

Then the language becomes relaxed, contemplative, meditative. The lens focus transitions to the view from a pair of binoculars. A pair of swans is being observed dreamily floating on a pond, maybe the same pond where the microscope universe originated from. The author's words allow us to realize that a very different state of being is achieved when seeing the world through a new lens and a new magnification. We are still in a moment, a detailed section of space and time, yet the blue water, the silence of nature, the swans unaware that they are of interest to anyone -- the larger scope of the objects and their arrangement in a manner that makes far more symmetrical sense to us allows room to breathe and experience without being disturbed or terrified as a result.

Post #3: Dawn Lundy Martin (3/18/15)

This week in class some of the prominent work we discussed was written by a contemporary poet named Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin's poetry strikes as very powerful not only in the language that she uses, but particularly in the fashion that the sentences are structured to call to mind very poignant and direct types of situations. The very first poem where she is discussing her father's death caught my attention at the beginning. Martin seems focused primarily on the important "living" details of her father's existence at the start, and these sentences which depict how her father functions at death's door form a shattering prologue of sorts that transitions into a new style of language, one that relies on the coming abstraction of death. Martin talks about the largeness of death, the idea of death as an inconceivable notion, a never-ending silence. She speaks of capturing her father's life as a photograph, a muscle memory of sorts that remembers the details of what used to encompass his life, held in suspension for one eternal moment. Accepting death and having the ability to preserve what is humanly possible of one's life. Titanic concepts for the living to attempt to understand, that's for certain.

Reading Response #2: Tocqueville

Discussing the collection of poems and/or stories contained within Khaled Mattawa's "Tocqueville", I think I was struck especially by one particular quality of his work, and that's the use of small but powerfully vivid details to describe the locations, people, and emotions that construct the broad landscape that gives us a view of global society, a view that wouldn't feel anywhere near as relevant without the intricate observations that we gain in passing. This widely varies, whether it's an observation from within a terrorist's tortured psyche, whether it's exploring sexual tensions from an unbearably frustrated angle, or simply taking note of the world around you while taking a walk with a cat. This may sound strange, but Mattawa has an almost Dickens-like quality: he uses an incredible amount of language and small detail to create something large and beautifully structured.

"Terrorist" (Khaled Mattawa Response) -- January 28, 2015

When reading Khaled Mattawa's poem "Terrorist" for the first time, I was struck with an incredible amount of symbolism representing the inner turmoil of a single human being, and the traumatic personal grief that has served him in developing extreme hatred towards the entire world. The poem outlines the idea that the central character has experienced both death and misery as a surrounding feature from a very young age, very clearly pointed out when he describes "the fire that lances the sky", "the arabesques of strewn corpses", the description of rubbing his brother's ashes on to his face, and using the "siamese twin" as a symbolic way of saying, I believe, that all this darkness both of the world around him and his brother's violent death at the hands of war have become a fused part of him, encouraging him to lash out with hate and aggression -- it seems at this point that we are starting to view the development of a terrorist. And he describes himself as always permanently connected to his brother. What will this vengeful connection lead him to next? It seems he views himself as both a murderer and a victim, a coward with poisonous thoughts built up within himself. All humans have many personal shades that warrant investigation.