Writing Assignment:
Pick a scene from a place in a landscape that you are in or in one that
you remember, and try to describe what is going on there from two
different perspectives, the close-up and the long shot. Think of it as
if you are holding a movie camera. In one scene you zoom in to get a
close shot of what is happening, and in another, you pull the camera
back so you get a panoramic scene.
Writing Sample:Up close like this, in the mirrored ball atop
the red and white striped barber pole at the South Pole, my face is
distorted. My goggles and the hood of my parka are stretched out and
flattened like a pancake. I look like a big red bug. I pull my neck
gaiter down so that I can see my face and I lean closer into the ball
and smile. My smile is wide and huge, like the smile of the Cheshire
cat in Alice in Wonderland, stretching out to the edges of my face.
Behind me in the ball I can see reflected perfectly the twelve flags of
the 12 original signatory nations of the Antarctic Treaty. They flap in
the polar wind. Some are tattered, their edges frayed. I wonder who
replaces them and how often they need to be replaced. I bend and peer
closer into the mirrored ball, like a fortune teller leaning into her
crystal ball. Behind the flags, in the shining mirrored globe, I can
just make out the silver hump of the dome at the South Pole, the big
dome under which everyone lives in the winter. I look again at my face
in the mirror, backed by the flags, the globe. The fur ruff on my parka
is rippling in the wind. My smile is still goofy and wide.
When I look up and away from the barber pole, out away from the dome,
in the opposite direction, I see white snow and blue sky. It is
absolutely flat. There is nothing, save small wind-made designs in the
snow, to give any interruption to the flatness. Unless, of course, you
count the mounds of snow made by bulldozers that are trying to clear
snow off parts of the old dome, so that parts of it can be salvaged and
a new South Pole station can be built. Around me I see the flatness,
the subtle change at the horizon between the white of the land and the
blue of the not-land. I see off in the distance the "Dark Sector," the
place where astronomers here do their work. It is called the Dark
Sector because they take care there to use as little artificial light
as possible because it negatively influences the images they can see in
their infrared telescopes. Off in another direction I see the building
that houses the scientists who work in the "Clean Air Sector." This is
an area where no one is allowed to walk or drive. The air there is the
cleanest air on earth and is sampled by scientists to give baseline
data on the presence of certain gases in the air planet-wide. If I turn
to my left I see a long line of jamesways, canvas or nylon domed
structures that house the summer employees at the South Pole. It looks
like a village over there, with steam rising from the metal chimneys.
All of this, though, is tiny, small, inconsequential, when I look again
beyond it, far out into the flatness, the flatness at the bottom of the
world.
Analysis:In this piece I take some time to focus on the
close-up of what I can see in the ball atop the barber pole. The ball
itself is about as big as a basketball. Then, I look up and survey what
is around me, as far as my eye can see.
Copyright 11.24.97
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