Some of these different ways of thinking I’m going to share are more major and drumrolly than others.
And although the Word document I’ve collected them is disorganised, I think they could be divided into those relating to space and those relating to time. (Yesterday’s fibres/fibres would be space.)
A lot of those I might include are be familiar time/space headspinners from popular philosophy books.
So, the idea that there is no absolute lock on scale.
We, as humans, have relations of size established by our bodies. And lots of our words for measurement derive from bone-lengths. A foot being heel to big toe. A yard, the distance from Henry I’s nose to the end of his outstretched index finger. And a cubit is anyone’s elbow to index finger. An inch is a thumb’s breadth.
But nothing pledges a bluebottle to this space of ours. For itself, each fly can be as big (as metaphysically bullish) as an ox in a prison cell.
I doubt flies sense unitary scale, because that wouldn’t be useful. Wing and draft need to be related if swishing newspapers are to be dodged.
And a blue whale might just as well feel a pinprick in a vasty fabric, because sensing their own bigness would make them less graceful, though this is perhaps nonsense.
But how jewellery is looked at, I think, by those who appreciate it — the brooch in the shape of a dragonfly — is by making the eye-size approximate to the spangled object.
Most rings look better as explored architecture than as curved baubles smaller than ears.
Those who find jewellery ugly do so because they aren’t prepared to adopt themselves and their egos to it.
The general lesson we can draw is about how to see things as we describe them.
As a writer, adopting this new scale-free view, you can be a lot more Lemuel Gulliver or Alice in Wonderland. You can be Borrower one minute and BFG the next.
And as a human who is a writer, you can allow yourself to feel the acid-trip vertigo of being yourself — and here’s the headspinner — simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic.
This is why I show students the Powers of Ten video.
Don’t be limited by scale.