When I give talks on awe, I begin with the definition that began this book: we feel awe in encountering vast mysteries that transcend our understanding of the world. Over the years, often a hand has risen, and this astute question soon followed: What about the awe we feel from the minuscule? When looking at a cell under a microscope? Or the sixty-eight Thorne miniature rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago, which portray domestic interiors from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries in astonishing detail, down to the light filling the rooms from outside, each within a two-by-two-foot space? Or the near microscopic brushstrokes of Jan van Eyck? These champions of small awe might then cite William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” or Walt Whitman’s spiritual homage to a blade of grass and cross their arms and raise their chins in defiance. They are onto something—microscopic awe.
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher archives microscopic awe. She has devoted many years to photographing the structure of bees’ eyes, their honeycomb constructions, blood cells, and the tissue of bone. It was her photos of her tears that moved me to reach out.
As a child in Minnesota, Rose-Lynn found awe in patterns of snowflakes, in the profusion of soft hairs on pussy willows, on school visits to a museum of science and industry, and in classes on quilts and mosaics. She sensed patterns. Relations. Deep, unifying structures. “Sacred geometries,” Rose-Lynn would repeatedly say, invoking the idea that there is transcendent, even spiritual, feeling found in seeing the deep geometric structures of the world. There are geometries of life patterns that we hear in the symbolic sounds of music and see in visual art.
When I visit Rose-Lynn in her home and studio in Sherman Oaks, California, her reverence for sacred geometries is on full display. On a table is a scattering of rocks of varied shapes and sizes; she grabs several and points out timeless patterns, visual stories of awe about the Earth’s geological evolution. On a dresser in the hallway sits a construction from her art school days, interconnected parallelograms creating a pyramid. From simple geometric forms emerges awe-inspiring complexity.
Rose-Lynn’s paintings from her thirties on her bedroom walls center upon “deconstructing the vanishing point” so notable in Renaissance painting, when the converging lines of a checkered floor in a cathedral or palace, for example, disappear. For Rose-Lynn, the vanishing point in her painting speaks to that which has no end, no content, even no existence. In hearing her say this, I appreciate how a visual technique in art can enable us to understand a big idea of awe: that beyond the dissolving self is expansion and infinity.
One day while setting up to work, Rose-Lynn found a dead bee on a windowsill. She placed it under a microscope and took photographs with a lens that captures the microscopic. This first series of photos is in her book
AWE!
She tells me: “There are patterns in nature beyond their physical form, and their deeper resonances make me sense a Golden Mean within us.” Rose-Lynn then riffs on the sacred geometry of the hexagon—it is in the Star of David, the shape of a cloud on Saturn, the Hagal rune from Nordic traditions, and our DNA. Art allows us to find awe in seeing the unifying geometries of life.
One day, Rose-Lynn received a call from the son of a man she had come to know when she was a student wandering Europe in the late 1970s. While in Paris, she had an acute flare-up of Gaucher disease, an inherited genetic disorder that caused deterioration in her hip bones, among other issues. (In Gaucher, an enzyme deficiency prevents the complete breakdown of certain cells, and instead causes them to accumulate in the spleen, liver, and bone, with serious consequences.) She caught a night train to Florence; by the time she arrived she could hardly walk. She dialed a phone number a friend had given her, and met Patrick, who fed her soup, hoisted her across a piazza so she could at least see Giotto’s frescoes and Michelangelo’s tomb, and got her into a hospital, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. When Patrick’s son called to say that he had died, she couldn’t stop the flow of tears.
