ScaleThe Powers of Ten, the little science film made by Charles and Ray Eames, is one I hope all school children still wish to watch on rainy school days (somewhat like this one, perhaps - somewhere in some suburb some cranky teacher is turning the lights off in the classroom and wheel the squeaky projector cart to the center and winding the reel into itself. I hope, I hope.) The children, I suspect, will not know what logarithmic scale is but they certainly will enjoy the film anyhow, with its exploration of space and magnitude, distance and depth, signs and sighs.
Starting at One, we see the man on his picnic blanket. The distance is a single meter away and that is an odd starting place. I remember thinking as a child, like I am certain some children still think: "If zero is before one, why not start there?" The problem deepens: "how would one show zero?" It is easier just to start at one, since one is a thing we can see. Zero, nothing, on the other hand, is immeasurable - just so inconceivably impossible that we can't even approach it. Once millimeter away would still be a distance, and a camera lens cannot actually enter the skin without going through it into negativity's territory. Zero, it seems, is an invisible membrane with such a dazzling surface tension that it cannot be ripped, let alone felt. Boys, girls - do not be afraid.
It's the same with the clock: 59 turns to 0 only in their numerical representations, in metaphor, or in symbol - in reality, though, that 59 becomes 59.9 and then 59.99 and then 59.999 and eventually we just have to agree to let it unfold, invisibly so, until a fully blossomed 60th consecutive second which is, in fact, a brand new hour and not quite the termination of an old one. Time - space, signs and a big sigh. We, us boys and us girls, are confused and all wiggled up.
So the choice is to ignore this zeroness, this totality based on the ethereal, and skip right on ahead into the space and distance that we know, can detect, can see and can show: One Meter. The body is shown from one meter away. This proximity allows for certain details, while obscuring others -- we can see he's a person, we can see he's on a blanket, we can see the grass, we can assume the weather, and so on and so on with an endless succession of surface level observations that stream along with blinding rapidity. Mundane. The focus is direct, as direct and forthright as these observances and this is where we begin to feel what the singer sings in his song: "Proof that One is so much more than None / than Two could ever be to One". Yes! A golden shining moment of clarity. From zero to one, from one to two - the factor is the same but the difference is much, much more immense; limitlessly, endlessly, ceaselessly, emphatically. Oh math, my my how we misuse you.
The distance grows, however, by powers of ten. From ten meters away from the subject, backing up into pure and uninterrupted space, we see more of the scene: person becomes smaller, environ becomes larger. Subject is engulfed in space! Boys, girls: do not fear - for your bodies will never separate, you will always stay firmly rooted in your little cocoon of a zero. You will always be encapsulated, lovingly, in your own nothingness; you will always be unable to break out of that none and into a one, let alone a two, a ten, a million. As far away as we can see things, we can never force this same distance in between our self and our self. We are indivisible, young friends, and the film by the loving little Eames couple is a way of solidifying this, however gropingly (as a blind hand reaches for the spectacles at the first light of dawn, as the seeing hand knocks about in the din of darkness) into the expanses of the mind. As observers, we can stand a single meter from the wall or we can step back a few times and change our distance/perspective: from here we begin to grasp a sense of what is called magnitude. We see not only the man, but the man set against a backdrop which, in turn, begins to inform the observer as much so as anything else. How is the man relating to his backdrop, and how is the backdrop relating to the man? We wonder, and can only wonder - as we are always locked inside ourselves, in a egg shaped little womb called a zero.
Exponents are funny things. Ex - a slash, a cross, the former, a symbol for nothing. In short, we can neatly fold up a line of zeroes into a single two or three digit form by employing these mighty proponents of compression. Something to the somethingth power. Not just a one, a ten, or a hundred, but thousands of them - to the thousandth power. We reduce, we compact, we take this distance and fold it end to end, then end to end, then end to end, until it is a bit closer to nothing, which is all we can ever understand.
So the camera moves exponentially away from the person on the blanket, in the sun and on the grass. One power of ten (10 meters) away, then two powers of ten (10 meters X 10 meters, or 100 meters) away an even more varied picture develops: the person vanishes into the nothingness of space! With distance, a large distance which is both measurable and tangible, we lose the ability to observe and what once had magnitude (a body: torso, limbs, head) is now a pinprick of blurred color dissolved in a sea of verdant grass. From this height, with this scale, however, we can gather more details about the person now seen in de-magnification: the town he lives in, or at least the town which bounds the park on four sides with its streets. Rich? Poor? He is laying on the grass in what appears to be the middle of the day, perhaps he is part of the leisure class - enjoying the sun while drinking in the passing hours. But, the children cry, but that's nothing to do with the man on the blanket - he's nothing in the middle of everything now.
Yes, kiddies, yes. And the camera keeps rocketing upward, proving just how insignificant we all are in our little tombs and rooms. Ten to the hundredth power, ten to the thousandth, the gaps and gas of space, watching as the earth itself in all its gummy blue and brown totality dwindles to next to nothing as well and this scale keeps shifting perspective the closer it gets towards the infinite (ten to the nothingth power). The one person blends into his grass, the grass blends into the land, and, just as two far away stars appear as one, there is this same combinational phenomena rigidly performed on the peoples down there on that stretch of land: the ten standing in a huddle appear as one tiny glob from a thousand or ten thousand meters away, the hundred dispersed across a tiny, dusty city become another single glob, and so on and so on until - from a dizzying height - all are reduced, all are compacted like so many exponents into a single little room. This is the mystic "connectedness" that the Gautama hints at, children .
And here, my dear, with a little hand fumbling out of a blanket and extending just just a little past your sleeping shoulder before succumbing to gravity and dropping, drooping, into a nice snuggly grab - here, is how two separate and complete things become a single little breath syncopated to the beat of itself. And here, darling, as how one enters another. Littleness and light, distance and some scale.
The children demand a reversal, the children demand to know the opposite, the children are screaming for the thing to stop going up, up, up and out - they are feeling stretched so thin that they're now approaching the same oblivion, and they demand to return to terra firma. The camera recedes, drops, and lowers to earth where it hovers, again, over the man's chest; a single meter away. With zero discussed, we needn't drag that gauzy concept up from the mire - let's simply dive right in!
If the intricacies and infiniteness of space cannot be grasped, we feel even more terribly alienated when the systems of our own humble bodies (with their rivers and branches, blood and nerves, humming organs and hugging bones) are approached from any sort of clinical length. The skin - all we see - is a mystery unto itself with its constellations imprinted on the surface and just below is all math and cosmos, infinite and as expanding as everything. Diving into the single person we see a rivulet that carries oxygen molecules (wind), follicles for hair (forests), the excretion of a single droplet of perspiration (yes, even a tempermental weather-system contained within!) and with this we've entered the exponent. That zero, that smashed and reduced thing, is unfolding itself into its more endless form. The infinite contained in the single, solid little person - the everything in the nothing. Oh, how that oblong ring encircles one like some twofold embrace, hugged from both back and front at the same time by some torso-less pairs of arms that wrap and bind and almost gag with their hold. Children, hush. We know, we know. That same anxiety born out of the limitlessness of space is the very same thing when reflected inward into our own bodies, with their own bio-mechanic systems. How we depend on such minute little cells! How the imperceptibly small is made so immense: collapsed vein, truncated artery, mutated molecule.
Can we calculate our own entropy? the children murmur among themselves.
Little ones, little ones. Existalienation is not on the agenda for today. We'll resume this topic post haste.
