Everyone knows - and everyone seems to love - the opening line from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence concerning a grain of sand and the manner in which, if you look closely enough, it seems to reveal an entire world.
Indeed, when viewed at a magnification of over 250 times, grains of sand are shown to be delicate, colourful structures of great beauty; tiny fragments of crystal, shell and volcanic rock, many thousands of years old and each one as unique as a snowflake.
Viewing the amazing photographs taken by Gary Greenberg reminded me not only of Blake, however, but also of Ian Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology (2012), who puts forward the interesting idea that rather than conceive of a flat ontological field or network, it's easier to think of a one-dimensional point or what he terms a tiny ontology:
"If any one being exists no less than any other, then instead of scattering such beings all across the two-dimensional surface of flat ontology, we might also collapse them into the infinite density of a dot."
This is being made simple and singular rather than small in size and it places a black hole at the centre of every object, just waiting to expand or explode with the ontological equivalent of the Big Bang.
Indeed, when viewed at a magnification of over 250 times, grains of sand are shown to be delicate, colourful structures of great beauty; tiny fragments of crystal, shell and volcanic rock, many thousands of years old and each one as unique as a snowflake.
Viewing the amazing photographs taken by Gary Greenberg reminded me not only of Blake, however, but also of Ian Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology (2012), who puts forward the interesting idea that rather than conceive of a flat ontological field or network, it's easier to think of a one-dimensional point or what he terms a tiny ontology:
"If any one being exists no less than any other, then instead of scattering such beings all across the two-dimensional surface of flat ontology, we might also collapse them into the infinite density of a dot."
This is being made simple and singular rather than small in size and it places a black hole at the centre of every object, just waiting to expand or explode with the ontological equivalent of the Big Bang.
See:
Gary Greenberg, A Grain of Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder, (Voyageur Press, 2008).
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 21, 26.
Note: William Blake's poem, 'Auguries of Innocence', is from a notebook known as the Pickering Manuscript. It was probably written in 1803, but remained unpublished until 1863. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website by clicking here.
Gary Greenberg, A Grain of Sand: Nature's Secret Wonder, (Voyageur Press, 2008).
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 21, 26.
Note: William Blake's poem, 'Auguries of Innocence', is from a notebook known as the Pickering Manuscript. It was probably written in 1803, but remained unpublished until 1863. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website by clicking here.
