Prompt: M.C. Escher: “Ascending and Descending”
M.C. Escher was an artist who made great use of optical illusions. When I look at some of his paintings, my brain sends me images of utter impossibility, images that seem to make no sense: stairs that loop back on themselves; a stream of water moving upward when it seems as though it’s going down; whatever the hell Belvedere is, a painting that gives me such a headache trying to process, that I actually can’t come up with the words to describe it. However, despite all of this, his painting make perfect sense, our brains are just built in such a way as to make it seem like they don’t.
Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. String Theory talks of many unseen dimensions, constructs of reality that exist but are just beyond our perception. Lovecraft talked of eldritch abominations; deities so vast, so powerful, so incomprehensible, that even a mere glimpse of reality as it truly is is enough to shatter one’s mind. We don’t even need to come up with ideas so fantastical as ‘unseen dimensions or ‘eldritch abominations in order to demonstrate that there may be more to reality than our normal perception would tell us: all we need is a powerful-enough lens.
Look at a field: you will see grass and dirt. Now look with a magnifying glass: you will see an entire world, teeming with life. Now look with a microscope: you will see an entirely different world, teeming with entirely different life. If one was to look even closer, one would see molecules, then atoms, then electrons, then quarks. All of this, beyond our perception, and yet these layers of reality exist nonetheless.
Word Count: 282
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