My Hammers: the Telescope and the Pen (Part 2)
More on the tools of reflection
Author’s note: this piece is a continuation of this post. Read that first to understand the references here!
The construction of telescope mirrors is an intensive, grinding process. I once visited the University of Arizona Mirror Lab, where the largest telescope mirrors in the world are designed and manufactured. Located in one of the few places it would fit – under the football stadium – and originally started with funding from the US Air Force, this impressive facility produces mirrors that exceed 27 feet in diameter, larger than many a Chicago apartment. The complicated process includes molding carefully engineered glass in giant rotating ovens and then using great robotic arms with hundreds of independent actuators to polish the surfaces to precisions less than 50 atoms. Normal mirrors this large would threaten to collapse under their own weight, but these mirrors are special. Engineers shape the mirrors in giant honeycomb structures, coping a design from insects with brains 1/5000th their size, to maximizing strength while allowing the great flowering comb to be twisted to the sky. Indeed, famed naturalist Charles Darwin called the engineering of the hive bee “absolutely perfect,” the ideal for “economizing labour and wax.” What thanks I own the tiny honey bee for my little tastes of the starry nectars of the night.
The construction of a text is a no less grinding or intensive process, a process in which I have yet to achieve the economy of the honey bee. “The line of words is a hammer,” Annie Dillard writes, comparing a narrative to walls in an old house ripe for renovation. Tap them to see what might go. “Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.”
But it’s not just the words themselves that need grinding, not just the sentences and metaphors that threaten to wallop my head as I attempt to polish to the nearest 50 atoms. There’s a proud heart behind the words in need of far more shaping; the more difficult part is the internal way the writing process grinds on me. My book from Dr. Mazza continued with this advice: “Don’t concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story…. The reader wants to see you trying – not trying to impress, but trying to get somewhere.”
Oof, called out. I want you to love me, dear reader. I want you to feel some deep connection to me, sitting over here, longing for your approval. I want to try to show off for you, contorting like some trapeze artist soaring in mid-air, at risk, of course, of falling flat on my face. I know that good writing, like good acrobatics, holds up a mirror to the world so that it can see itself. And yet, the more I try to polish my mirror – impress you with its shininess – the more I end up just smudging it with the puss of my pride, the fingerprints of my insecurity. The creeping, insidious, perhaps most-difficult-to-face problem when writing is that I want you to look at me, but you’ve come to look at yourself.
Then again, perhaps that’s the key to the magic, a two-way street connecting author and reader, you, and me. We all, after all, just want to be seen. Scarlett Thomas writes that as much as we convince ourselves that it is only the words that matter, the fact that there’s a breathing sweating author behind the words, in the end, is important. I’ll read something, and think that’s me, and then I squint and wonder about the human on the other side of those words who also must brush her teeth or comb his hair.
Modern reflecting telescopes are constructed from clear glass rather than reflective metal due to its superior durability and reliability under changing temperatures and stresses. The reflective coating is applied after the fact, in giant tubes like polio lungs, where aluminum is vaporized in a smooth thin sheet a few atoms thick. That thin coat provides all the reflective power necessary – the complete reversal needed – to bring the universe to our seeking eyes.
And is a line of words much different? Authors breath more than any shaped glass. In those glancing moments of insight I peak behind the reflective sheen of sentence and metaphor that cover an author and wonder if they too are a little like me. Indeed, as I think on it further, the best authors are seen not through their image in the glass, but in reflection – a slight bending of the light that hits your eye just a little different, sparking a ray of connection across space and time.
[To be continued]