” It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in scrutinizing… that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness…” -Henri Poicare
It is a photograph of a coat hanger, a hanger hanging from a knob, and one might easily think that is all there is to it. The wire is black, slightly warped, a bit akimbo and humble in its way, though somehow self-satisfied. It is a hanger that simply hangs, coming equipped with no special wood, no padding, no paper sheath proclamation of “I heart my dry-cleaners.” There is only the twisted neck, strangled below the hook that hugs the knob, and the imperfect isosceles triangle suspended from it, casting a slight gray shadow on the otherwise immaculate closet door and wall which create the solidly white background.
* * *
For days after the attack, Greenwich Village was silent. They cut us off from the rest of the world, as if 14th street were the dividing line between that which was real and that which was surreal, the hair that divides sanity and madness. Those of us who stayed smelled the smoke of Ground Zero in a quiet solitude. We gazed at our neighbors over their facemasks and scarves; occasionally, we even smiled understanding half-smiles, but we no longer knew one another, just as we no longer knew ourselves, and we no longer knew our world. I walked along Broadway with my friends as they photographed the dust cloud, standing in the center of the huge street abandoned even by the caravans of yellow cabs.
I began to see my yesterdays as if they were love poems, lost in the mail and only partly remembered, in broken metaphors. In a sense, I felt more in love than I ever have, despite everything. Before it happened, I told my new friends or acquaintances that I hadn’t had sex since June, and I suppose they pretended to be shocked. I was the girl sitting on the floor of the smoke-filled jazz club waiting for the 3 am set to begin. I was the girl waiting for the moment when all awkwardness fades away and the entire room — musicians, subdued drunkards, sleepy college students, bricks and old photographs on the wall — begins to blur into one floating melody. We all tapped our feet or swayed our shoulders or nodded our heads or sat perfectly still as the music invaded our negative space, and when we glanced at one another in the dark we felt as if we must have known each other on some level where it hardly mattered that we neither knew one another’s names nor spoke the same language nor read the same poetry. We were fluent in listening and thought and almost-thought and non-thought: we were all in love.
* * *
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
- e. e. cummings (65)
* * *
The door in the picture is slightly cracked, open only wide enough to leave another black line, serene in its straightness but only millimeters shy of parallel with the edges of the frame. This line, which urges the viewer closer to the photograph and beckons her to look behind the paper, somehow, to see what is hidden, is not so thin as the wire of the lonesome hanger, but intersects it from beneath in two places as it travels its course from the top to the bottom of the photograph. The knob of the door to which the hanger clings is colored golden but is not at all flashy. It, like the hanger, is only there, in a room which must be nothing more than plain, quite flatly utilitarian, with its white white walls, tinted slightly rose by the light. The source of this pinkness is unseen, as is the majority of the door itself, the greater part of the walls, yet in this tiny view, not much larger than a coat hanger and a knob, the character of an entire room, an entire life, can be observed, if one only takes the time to notice it, to see. The plain and simple things are all too often written off quicky as shallow, lacking meaning beyond that which is immediately thrust forward.
To say that a hanger (or a photograph, a story, an emotion, a scene or a life) is simple is to say it has no value, if one defines simplicity is the reciprocal, the opposite, of complexity. This black and white vision leaves the viewer (or participant, as the case may be) unsatisfied. In order to full experience and appreciate life or art, one must be able to detect the utter simplicity of that which is complex, as well as the complexity of that which seems simple at first exposure. One must find the beauty in each, and realize those separate beauties are in fact one.
However, simplicity should not be marred by transposing it into that which it is not. Though that which is simple often masks many layers of complexity, simplicity itself should not be defined as a function of complexity. The beauty of simplicity comes along with a certain controlled elegance. We mustn’t contemplate so much our tiny scene, our doorknob, our crack in the door, our black hanger. It is only itself, and that is enough. It is a scene for any room, quite normal, yet somehow so profoundly simple. In its simplicity, its straight-up reality, lies meaning and beauty. The outline of this hanger could have been applied to the surface of the wall by a skilled calligraphist with his black sharpie marker. Nothing could be so basic as this triangle, which hangs amid the whiteness like a woman’s hips, bones poised to be palmed.
* * *
I remember, before I came here, my naked body straight and flat against tightly woven hotel carpet, my neck held in place between his ankles. That was my love. That was June and this is September. Sometime between those two months saw my mother tearfully walking down to the subway station, leaving me alone in Greenwich Village; sometime between those two months everything changed.
Still, here I remain, in New York City, where buildings fall down and thousands of people die so close by that I smell the smoke of the explosion for days. There he remains, 2000 miles away, thinking about it all too much. Nothing is as simple as a hanger on a doorknob in April, a picture he sent me with others, showing me his surroundings as they were and as I imagine they still remain. There is no appreciating quiet beauty in a war zone, and no one really feels right about going to a jazz club in “a time like this”. Simplicity seems lost, another casualty in what everyone seems to refer to as “the tragedy, ” but I am still in love.
* * *
I am taken with this thing that is smallness. The word itself defines everything I seek. Smallness is the only paradox, and perhaps the most basic truth. Within the very small, the indistinct and indivisible pieces of life, lay worlds of complexity so often obscured that they again become what is simple, what is ultimate and beautiful. The concept of infinite smallness underlies all of science. I study cells. A cell is by definition a tiny thing, yet with any knowledge of biology comes the realization that within a cell are numerous smaller elements, sub-specks working constantly as an orchestral whole, accomplishing feats of such scope and specificity that no chemist or biologist could hope to reproduce them in the macroscopic world. As research progresses, humans burrow deeper into the realm of the very small, all the while opening up increasingly complex worlds of knowledge which stack like Lego blocks. Atoms to electrons to quarks and down down down toward nowhere. What next? Is there a limit to the number of times something can be reduced to fragments? Is there a truly finite idea in all the universe?
Conversely, what are the truly large things? What is hugeness, what is complexity? What are the things that break us apart with their sheer gravity? What are the ideals which enlighten us? We break them all smaller and smaller into shapes and lines and numbers and letters and specks and soot. We hold them and we love them and we strangle them and we fuck them until they are not entities on their own, but parts of ourselves. Complexity cannot exist without simplicity. But what then is life itself? What is a child, what is a person, what is a lover? Are these beings functions of the amounts of space they take up, both in the carbon-based world and in the memories of others, which we are beginning to view as indeed part of the carbon-based world? Are they something more? Is to be alive to be truly, undeniably, complex? Of course. But life is complex beyond the reaches of human thought, and if true complexity is unfathomable, then everything we see as complex is a simplification. Nothing is completely understood at the extremes - we don�t know the limit of largeness just as we don’t know the limit of smallness.
Size is only a matter of projection. I choose to project on negative infinity; I believe the truth lies in the very small, the very simple. I look for it in a cell; I look for it in a photograph of a hanger on a wall, in a single solitary moment or an image, in a word, in a feeling. But one could easily explore the opposite extreme. It is incorrect to define vastness as nothing more than the sum of small things. Layers of complexity come with emergent properties, quite separate from what lies beneath.
* * *
Restless, in the days after the twin towers fell, we, the onlookers, were all pulled in opposite directions. There was on one side the desire to join the new cause, to add to the hope, to help, to be there, to survive. Constantly still was the equal but opposite pull of depression, of wanting to hide and to run away to and to make it all simply disappear. Thus we, the bystanders, all walked around with looks of confusion and shock on our faces, we all broke down from time to time, we all cried, we all decided to change the world, we all decided to accept it, and we all decided to deny. Eventually, we, the survivors, all just kept on living, with the pull that never completely faded, and noticed there was no way to describe the true color of the air. That shade was thick and touchable, and it could never be contained on a television screen, not in the constantly repeating video coverage of the second plane’s entry, not in the crumble or in the aftermath or even in the stream of interviews with eyewitnesses. For those of us who were there, that color became like a repeating number in the back of the mind of a semi-neurotic. 3333333333 all the time. Walk, 3, talk, 3, sleep, 3, 3, 3. 3, the color of our tragedy, which couldn�t be subdued by flipping the off switch on a remote control. The sirens kept wailing and the fighter planes kept flying overhead, as the fake Rolexes and Oakleys sold on the street were replaced by cheap American flags. I was still in love.
* * *
The hipbones in the hanger, which are not really there, I see perhaps only because unlike the rest, I know this is not only some closet and some hanger, but your closet, your hanger, your golden knob, your lighting and your lines, and yet another piece in the puzzle that comprises your story. I would very much like my own hips to be settled in your hands, secure against your stark paper-white walls, floating in this photograph with my body in your endless expansive negative space. I ask myself, could I ever be so fragile, so elegant as this black hanger with its painterly, unbroken line of wire? Could I offset a wall with parallel shadows while retaining such grace, such finite placement? Or is it enough that I recognize the beauty of your photograph, of the mundane objects you have captured in a way only you can? Is it quite enough that I see the sensuality of what to most must be only just a hanger, a coat hanger hanging on a knob, and nothing more?
* * *
“in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,” (3); “nothing which we are able to perceive in this world equals/ the power of your intense fragility” (13/14); “the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)” (19); “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” (20). These are statements of contradiction. How can that which is frail be powerful? How can one body, one essence, one person (with small hands, no less), contain all that is implied by this poem? How can that which is tiny be at the same time boundless? How can one poem explain everything?
* * *
The massive can be ugly, can disguise itself as fate, can color itself gray as hate. The massive can impose itself, in all its various pieces. Have not the screams, the tears, the broken windowpanes, the calls home, the candles, the dust, the flames and frightened faces changed us all forever, down to the tiniest particle? One voice repeats itself, in oscillating sound waves, frequencies raining down from a jet plane, connecting one world to another: “The plane’s been hijacked.” It is hard to concentrate; it is hard to be still, to simply BE, when the world is forever in the way. “The plane’s been hijacked. We’re all going to die.” I see it in slow motion, that building falling millimeter by millimeter upon itself. I see a place I stood in myself, marveling at the cleanliness, the order, the perfection, yielding mass chaos. And where is simple beauty in all that? Where can we find it, despite everything? “The plane’s been hijacked. We’re all going to die. I love you.”
Love is the smallest thing of all, by virtue of its simplicity - it is purely what it is, and there can be no other description that fully conveys it - and in its ability to encompass everything else. To be small is to be also immense; to be simple is to be also complex. Look at a hanger, at a cell, at a note vibrating off the walls, a voice, a sigh, a moment suspended, I love you. The entire world, in a sense, is surrounded and covered by love; we are all a part of it, tapping into it, as if drinking from a fountain, or floating in the ocean, or falling from the sky as rain. When one is in love, one can’t help but feel that one’s self and one’s lover are only very small particles drifting around in some higher state of being, that love itself is the tangible force which holds everything together. Yet, as e. e. cummings explores in his poem “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,” the broad expanses of love are often projected inward, or, in this case, into one’s object of affection. The speaker of this love poem describes the awe he feels in the power his lover holds over him. The speaker of this love poem describes the awe I feel in the power my lover holds over me. Love is both tiny and vast. Love, in its endless simplicity, pervades even the most huge and horrific disasters. Despite everything, love is everything.