Life gets way more magical when you view it as a human mosaic. I know it’s easy to become disenchanted nowadays. Living is expensive, we consume way more than we create, and rich social connection is hard to come by. Art is dead, or AI-generated. With countless streams of (unnatural) amounts of information, there is little space to notice. Human mosaicism is a practice of noticing, and it informs me personally, socially, and spiritually. Let me tell you why it’s so cool.
A mosaic is a handcrafted piece of art made up of tiny individual tiles called tesserae. This ancient-sounding word could mean glass, ceramic, stone, or any number of recycled material. Each tile is not very pretty. Many tiles tossed together are also not very pretty. The eclectic pieces must be formally arranged with intention to make something cohesive.
The littlest tesserae in our lives arrange together with intention, if you choose to see them that way. That’s the thing about noticing. Noticing is the act of choosing to see. Poetry does this best. As precisely as possible, poetry uses exact words to affect a specific effect (quick little lexicon lesson for ya). Poets can spend seconds or hours perfecting the order of their words. They arrange their word mosaics for pristine interconnectedness because they want you to see what they’ve noticed.
I’m sure you’ve read a poem or two that feels way too personal to the poet’s life. The events or feelings described seem too niche to translate to any broad audience. This is intentional. Poets can be lyricists, but they are not one in the same. Songs made for passive consumption are not meant to make you notice.
An undergrad professor very dear to me used to make all his students close their eyes while he read poems out loud. He read at an unnatural pace compared to regular conversation. Afterward, he would ask us questions like, “What did you notice?” and, “What are we meant to see here?” Then he would break the words down into their basic components. Instead of glossing over a poem in its entirety, we would take each image for what it was. Then, we would take notice of what the poem did as a whole. He taught us that poems have agency. Poems do stuff.
Notice how you have to claim your agency when noticing something. You see a herd of cows on a drive, and you point or shout excitedly. You could be like my father and jump up from your seat in a frenzy whenever a unique bird flies nearby. You have to do something when you take note.
Unfortunately, passive consumption is killing the art of noticing. It makes the idea of the human mosaic feel cheap; however, seeking the interconnectedness of events / motifs / people in my life brings joy. It can do the same for you.
You met that person and lost the friendship so that you could meet another one of his/her friends. You stuck with that awful job because a coworker saw you in your time of need, and they became a serendipitous mentor. Your pet died on this day last year, and you saw another one just like it in someone’s window so that you could remember the love it brought to your home. These are generalized examples, and for fear of becoming one of those uppity poets, I won’t expand on my own examples. For now. I urge you, readers, to take note.
Leave a Reply