Fun With Convergences

Feature | robin, March 15th, 2006

Here are a few of our own convergences. From Robin: the sparkling night sky and light filtering through ordinary house dust on a sunny day.

Cosmic Dust [Lestyn Hughes / Flickr]

Earthy Dust [Kangan Arora / Flickr]

What drew me to these images was the visual pattern of white speckles on a dark background, and the notion of particles floating in space. I wasn’t really thinking about what they had in common beyond that. One is sublime, I thought, the other, mundane. Then I remembered this: the stars themselves are just giant clusters of cosmic dust, and this dust is the very stuff of our universe. Whether floating in our homes or floating in space, dust is dust, and the way the sun illuminates dust in the cosmos is not so different from the way it filters through our living room window. The realization of the connections between these two disparate images made the stars seem more mundane, and the dust more sublime. And was a reminder that everything, here and there, comes from the same building blocks of matter. Which turns around and becomes sublime again.

And from Greta:

Lawfarm [atomicity / Flickr]

Ant farm [brendaj / Flickr]

Flikrite atomicity unwittingly tagged this convergence himself. His caption to the window washers: “a construction site made of glass is like one huge ant farm.” But at best, convergences push further than the photographic analogies. The real convergence is the voyeuristic tradeoff of a nice plate-glass view– you can keep the binoculars on the windowsill as long as you can keep the thought at bay that the guy across the way is looking your way, too. It’s the way we meticulously put up and spritz and squeegee our own display cases. We’d like to think that we’re like the noble worker ants, hefting workloads of 50 times our body weight, moving them, sorting, processing. But in the white collar world, not much of that can be seen. At least to look at an ant farm you can see progress and change. The reason we’re not worried about corporate peeping toms is that for most of us, there’s no visual record of the work we do anymore. Maybe the inbox grows and shrinks, but for the most part all you’d see is the same ficus plant, the same computer and desk and pantsuit that’s been there for years.

[On a brighter note, it’s also nice to be reminded of our relative insignificance compared to ants. On our evolution show, E.O. Wilson said that if the human race was wiped out tomorrow, the world wouldn't really miss us, but if ants went extinct, we'd really be in trouble. Take a listen]

For more convergences, visit our flickr group.