I’ve spent most of the last few months looking at full stops and insignificant moments. In an attempt to prove that nothing is truly insignificant, (especially where it is imbued with more significance than it should otherwise have), I have been focussing on full stops and magnifying them until they take up most of the sight.
A couple of weeks ago I woke up with reduced vision in one eye which meant that the very centre of my vision in my left eye was similar in proportion and design to the very full stops that I’d been magnifying. Needless to say it was a spooky coincidence, and it put me off the Significant Full Stop project for a while, because it seemed too weird to be looking at the fuzzy images of full stops through fuzzy vision, therefore adding further fuzziness to the project.
I have since undergone various tests and appointments during which the doctors and hospital have concluded that the condition is temporary. It’s called Central Serous Retinopathy, and it affects white males between the ages of 30 and 50, of which I am. It’s caused by too many steroids in the system, which the body produces naturally to counter stress. I’ve not been aware of being under any stress, but hey ho, if that’s what they reckon then I’ll go along with it.
The bad news is that it might last half a year.
So now I’m looking at insignificant things through different eyes, literally. I’m imbuing everything with a Significance than they should otherwise have, because for a while I was afraid that I would never see again. There were paint splattered dots on the floor of the eye clinic waiting room. The nurse had given me eye drops which had unfocused my eyes but I could still see the dots, only just. They reminded me of the floor of Manchester Airport. I was conscious that they were there, but my mind was filling in the details. The dots might not even have existed at all. But my brain told me so.
Part of the condition, apparently, or at least with macular degeneration, is that the eye will, every now and then, hallucinate and see things which aren’t really there. The eye will half see something and the brain will fill in the gaps. I will be seeing things that aren’t even there. Of course, I still have one functioning eye, so this will probably not happen, which is a shame. I’m rather looking forward to the hallucinations.
So for now the exact details of the original full stop exist in memory more than anything else, because even looking at it properly will not give a true representation of its real state. For some reason this is far more exciting than any of the experiments in magnification, because it exists far more vibrantly and explicitly in my imagination than it ever did on the page.
Monthly Archives: July 2016
The Most Signficant Full Stop (Part Twelve)
For the last couple of months I’ve had a bit of a thing with full stops. You might have noticed. I’ve been obsessed with small events and how they have incredibly significance for only a very short period of time. A full stop on a piece of prose can be likened to walking through a town and scratching one’s arm, brushing a strand of hair from ones face. At that exact moment in time, which only lasts for less than a second, they are the most pressing concerns imaginable, only to be forgotten less than a second later.
For the purposes of this project, therefore, I have been giving full stops far more significance than they ever had, and expanding them to cover the entire screen.
It is therefore somewhat ironic that yesterday I woke from a normal nights sleep to find that I’d lost some vision in my left eye, and that everything I look at has a perfect round circle, very much like a full stop, right in the centre of my vision. The fact that this perfect circle resembles some of the art work that I have been creating is somewhat ironic.
Indeed, ever the optimist, I see the large circle in my vision as a piece of permanent conceptual art which is now with me all the time, (unless the hospital can sort it out for me). Which then led to other thoughts: what if it were possible to beam artwork directly into the vision of the viewer, that they might have it automatically plastered over their vision? A Jackson Pollock migraine, a Rothko headache.
I have attempted to recreate some of the variations of the circle theme that I have been seeing below. And if you look back at some of my previous posts about the Most Significant Full Stop, they do seem freakily similar.
The Most Significant Full Stop. (Part Eleven).
Yesterday I extrapolated a full stop from a text of writing, and then using screenshots, managed to magnify it to such an extent that it took up nearly the whole screen.
In doing so I was imbuing the full stop with far more significance than it might otherwise have. The next step was to print off the full stop on to some A4 paper, and affix it to an ordinary wall on the back of a shop, down an alleyway, in Paignton, Devon.
The full stop was certainly striking and again this imbued it with far more significance than it should have had. After all, this was just an ordinary full stop taken from some text, typed with no idea that it would be such a statement of intent, typed merely to aid the comprehension of the text.
Kafka’s father said that he was ‘morbidly preoccupied with the insignificant’ and I believe I understand what Otto Kafka was alluding to in the sudden elevation of this full stop.
The next part of the project was to reassign the full stop with its original intent, that of aiding in the comprehension of text. By taking photographs of the full stop as it hung on the back of a shop in an alleyway in Paignton, I was able to stand further away and keep on taking photographs, until the full stop was just a dot again.
Using poster making software, I coloured in the photograph with the exception of the full stop.
I then added the full stop back into some random text, where it once again functions as a full stop, and not as a statement of insignificance. Can you spot it?
The Most Significant Full Stop (Part Ten)
The ability of anybody with word processing equipment, smart phones, tablets, computers, laptops and anything else which types, to create grammar of their own concoction, grammar of their own conception, means that there are more full stops now in the world than at any one time. One of the reasons for this is the short attention span of people used to sound bites and social media updates, Twitter accounts, website addresses, snippets of news and information. Sentences are now shorter. Like this one. This means that there are more full stops than ever before, less semicolons and commas, less brackets, except when using text speech.
This never used to happen in the days of Marcel Proust.
The paragraph at the start of this passage contains five full stops. Of those five full stops, one of them means a lot to me and idolise it. Can you guess which one it is?
As an experiment I have screensaved this page and magnified the full stop to its fullest extent. In the normal run of things, it would have been completely missed, a psychological notification, almost subconscious as they eye scans over it, picks up the necessary information. The next stage of this project will be that I print off the full stop and post it somewhere in the town in which I live, (Paignton, Devon). How many people will then see it?
This might very well prove to be a very exciting line of inquiry.
Robert Garnham 