It was more than just a tool for viewing things up close. It was of course very detective-story in form and function, and I had acquired from somewhere a precocious fascination with detection, both as drama and as tales of intellectual puzzles. That was my initial attraction - here I was, with an accoutrement favored by various of my heroes. It was a numinous object, a connection with fiction and fable, as much as any contemporary kid’s toy light saber. It goes without saying that I understood as little of the realities of detection as a proud lightsaber wielder would understand of the realities of physical combat. Less, probably.
But the more I used it, played with it, contemplated it, the more I found fascination with what lenses do. I tried to magnify objects as much as I could, marveling at textures and grain entirely invisible to my unaided eye. Of course I burned intricate designs on pieces of paper - what child doesn’t? - and was awed to be informed that the tiny burning dot was actually a photographic image of the sun. When the magnifying glass was not closely focused, I could see the shadow cast by the chipped spots on the edge. I could twist the handle so that the light splayed out into fantastic geometrical sweeps. I experimented with focal length, watching magnification blur out into chaos and then suddenly reappear upside down (and reversed right to left as well, although I didn’t grasp that right away) as I moved the lens further from my eye. In my own way, I was getting an introduction to ray optics that was perhaps more emotional than mathematical. That magnifying glass was my hands-on teacher about light, years before I took anything remotely resembling a physics course. A scientifically literate family is a wonderful thing.
Besides its optical magic, the lens afforded me the opportunity to study glass itself, especially as revealed by those chipped places around the rim. When another childish passion, rockhounding, emerged in my life, the lesson of those fracture patterns gave me a boost in understanding mineralogy and geology. Fresh fractures tell secret lessons about the behavior of materials under stress. When I saw conchoidal fractures in obsidian and anthracite, I got it right away. Descriptions of paleolithic flintworking made intuitive geometric sense. And of course, few things are as rewarding to inspect with a trusty magnifying glass as bits of rock. Things that seem drab to the naked eye sometimes, under magnification, become wondrous tiny mazes of intricate crystalline structure. The magnifying glass was not only numinous, it was arcane: a possession serving as a window on previously unrevealed worlds, a magical key to things hidden from ordinary sight.
Later I learned about telescopes and microscopes and prisms, and put things together mentally and physically. When I did get to physics in school I learned to solve equations of refraction and focus. I found it pretty easy stuff, and I give a lot of credit to the magnifying glass that Don gave me.
There was more to it though. That magnifying glass had shaped my imagination much more than I had realized. The Lens, as a concept, remained numinous and arcane. Always stories with observatories and spyglasses held a special power for me. And then, of course, E. E. Smith’s Lensman series came along. Smith’s “Lens” was neither an optical nor a focusing device, getting its name from its lenticular shape; but it made complete talismanic sense to me - I was smitten by the word “Lens” in the title alone when I discovered those in the Public Library in Los Alamos. I was fourteen, I think.
Smith’s work has a lot of cringeworthy elements in it, mostly deriving from the patriarchal norms and excruciatingly dorky slang of mid-20th century American engineering culture. Smith as a writer was more notable for his headlong vigor than for the quality of his prose; he gushed far too much, and far too phallically, about titanic applications of imaginative physics; but without his work we’d never have had Star Wars, Babylon 5, nor Star Trek, let alone the rich body of Space Opera fiction that needs a post of its own. Smith set the stage for all of those, so our star-roaming imaginations owe him an incalculable debt.
Donnella Meadows was a writer of a very different sort. She was the lead author of the 1972 book Limits to Growth, a formal application of Systems Theory to natural, economic, and human activities and resources on the planet. That book, which used early computer models to illustrate the intellectually unremarkable idea that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet, provoked a very shrill firestorm of scorn and denunciation. As a result, a lot of people still vaguely recollect that “Limits to Growth was debunked”; it never was. (A neat illustration of how the effectiveness of propaganda seems to have an inverse relationship to its factual accuracy.) Limits to Growth’s main premises have proven out. They are unexpectedly, and unpleasantly, close to the actual data curves from 1972 to the present.
As a scientific and imaginative device, lenses were a recurring motif in the back of my mind. So it was happily breathtaking, in the introduction to Donnella Meadows and Diana Wright’s seminal book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, to read this passage:
You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, others through the lens of a telescope, and still others through the lens of systems theory. Everything seen through each kind of lens is actually there. Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete.This book is intensely important in many ways - a commonsense, nontechnical, accessible exposition of the basics of Systems Theory - but it was the unexpected emotional impact of that simple metaphor, weaving together as it did a lot of threads from the slow development of my thought over a lifetime, that stayed with me. So much so that I excerpted a bit of it as one of the guiding mottoes of this blog.
I do have a lot of lenses that are important to me, and any or all of them are likely to appear in these pages. Systems Theory, semantics, information work both pragmatic and theoretical, human ecology, fantasy and science fiction, history, contemporary civilization, music, handwork, politics, shade-tree philosophy, whatever. I will be resurrecting and sometimes rewriting old content from other places.
One of my pronounced ethical interests is feminism, so it’s pleasant to include, as the other guiding motto here, another female (albeit fictional) voice. Please heed that. Whiny-assed pearl-clutchers will probably want to spend their precious internet time elsewhere. I have some vehement ideas about things, and no compunctions about resorting to NSFW vocabulary.
Picturesque language, after all, is another interesting lens in its own right.
