Stretchy Thoughts

[B] My unoriginal take on my original experience

May 28, 2023

The other day (or was it years ago?) I was taking a stroll along a boardwalk, enjoying the warm ocean breeze as it rolled off lapping waves, over the beach, and across my path. As I walked, I happened across a man sitting at a squat table selling his art. I stopped to look and chat. The man looked like he belonged here by the ocean. Sun-steeped and weathered, his skin was like old leather. His calloused hands delicately gripped a thin brush that flicked across canvas while he spoke to me. His work was beautiful, but most noteworthy to me was its size. The man cradled a tiny square canvas in his hands, no larger than an inch or two on one side. There in that tiny space, his brushes added miniscule strokes of color here or there, combining them to portray breezy seascapes, cozy cottages, and a multitude of other beautiful and detailed landscapes.

What first caught my attention was how the man was able to cram such detail into such small spaces, but as I perused his work, one particular frame jumped out at me. Unlike the intricate landscapes around it, this painting was dominated by a single face. A woman’s face, painted with apparent affection, smiled warmly up at me from the table where it lay.

Now if you are familiar with this blog, you may have the inkling already that this post is not about paintings, and you’d be right. After all, where’s the whiplash without the sudden changes?

The features of the woman struck a chord in my mind that nearly every one of us must have hidden away somewhere. It wasn’t so much a memory, as a feeling, of being an infant. We were all born in some way or another, and for many of us our first moments are being held in the arms of our mothers or fathers. Well, I guess our first real moments nowadays are having shit and blood wiped off of us by a doctor or nurse, before being handed to one of our progenitors, but I digress.

Human infants are not only the most vulnerable humans, they’re also among the most vulnerable infants full stop. A baby Giraffe can sprint for their life in T-minus five minutes after its birth (don’t quote me on that), but a human baby relies heavily on its caretakers for years after its birth. There are obvious advantages to each of these that a biologist could probably tell you, but I’m more interested in the effects that this has on our realities. That picture of a woman’s face, filling the entire frame, small as it may be, made me think of a baby looking up into its mother’s face and in doing so, seeing the entire universe as it knows it.

When it comes down to it, the shape of the world depends so little on some fanciful idea like “objective reality.” When your picture frame is as small as an infant’s, the warmth of your parents’ love fills every corner of your world. As we grow, so does our picture frame, and we come to see that there is much more going on than what we first thought. Now imagine that infant grows up to be Galileo Galilei, peering through a telescope, stretching his canvas as far as it will go to incorporate an ever-growing frame of reference in which to paint his reality. Where does it end, with the edge of objective reality? Perish the thought.

For mortal, time-bound meat sacks like us, the furthest boundary of the universe is the edge of our personal experience, and there’s no way around that fact. The decisions you make, where you invest your time, these are the things that determine the shape of the universe as you know it. Of course, there are things outside of your control; people love to tug at the canvases of others, attempting to pull them into the shape of their own. Be a steward of your world, or others will.

My world is made of words, whether by choice or otherwise, and I’ve come to love and accept that frame of reference. Like paintings on canvas and nearly everything else, words are best enjoyed in good company. I can’t thank you all enough for reading and following along while I try my best to build a world of words that says what I feel I am.