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.