levelheaded: Small Picture

Someone says “[s]mall [p]icture,” and that “big picture” that’s the main part of an idea or situation is also there. Usually people with the ability to see this big picture are deemed successful—it’s they who don’t get bogged down in potentially distracting details.

Hanae Jonas’s “Small Picture” pivots on looking—at the small picture, the big one, and those between. “Don’t look too much        or it gets tempting,” the poem starts, a command or advice not to observe too much, or not to appear or seem to another’s eye “too much.” (A wish toward invisibility?) Later, “someone [is] always transfixing,” and it seems that gaze is usually involved when the transfixed, the spellbound are pierced through. In other words, transfixion leans, often, on looking (although you’ve probably also been enchanted by a sound or memory or sensation). Line 11’s simile, “like an icon         outlined thick in gilt,” recalls gilding, a coating applied to enhance the look of a thing.

The poem is “after a line by Stern”: a “line,” that is, not a poem, or an oeuvre (“[d]on’t look too much”). Any poem is a “[s]mall [p]icture,” in that it chooses what to include to the exclusion of mostly everything else. Big pictures, poems aren’t—their material is details, and, in a you-are-what-you-eat way, they exist as details of our life. Even if they’re very important to us, still they’re supplemental, filling out our lives after we ensure our own stability—poems aren’t food, air or water; they’re not shelter. Big picture here.

In the 14-line poem, there are six “-ing” words. Even though they’re a mix of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, those “-ing” words imply continuity, background activity—“ing” feels like motion. (Think back to your middle school foreign language class, when you were learning how to build phrases like, While I was washing dishes, you walked in.) The tension Jonas creates by juxtaposing her “Small Picture” title (Inviting looking) with “Don’t look too much” is exaggerated even more by the “-ing”s. It’s disconcerting to not know where to look and to have ambient noise thrown in. It’s a challenge to pin down or parse anything in this poem’s deflective world of moving targets.

Speaking of pinning things down: end words of each line are often abstract concepts (“tempting,” “nothing,” “times,” “feeling,” “always,” “know,” “ways”). The exceptions, then, are transformed by this expectation to abstractions, at the very least giving us pause. What really is “dark”? “[A] tape,” “law,” “gilt,” “unholy”? The shaky, halting, hesitant pattern shakes us up.

Besides the look/don’t look dichotomy, the poem, written in couplets, is otherwise shot through with duality. Line eight begs for “any higher law,” but is contrasted with the societal law: “in any room there’s always / someone who can’t be talked to / someone always transfixing.” In line six, “Each time how” is a declaration buoyed by a questioning undercurrent. The final words claim it was “inevitable […] to want it both ways.” The “regret” of line two speaks to choices, and how making one means you’re choosing against all other choices. It’s a binary sadness, that you can only lead a single life, the necessity of paths and how they depend on detail. We want to step back and let our eyes go fuzzy to get that elusive big picture, yet we’re busy wandering our (very) individual paths.

– The Editors