Small Acts of Disappearance (6 page)

From the first glance, miniature objects unsettle our perception: because of their disparity in scale, because something is not real or right about them, we're forced to look again. Like any discrepancy, especially any unexpected distortion of size, they stand out (like the proverbial, swollen sore thumb), they ‘shock us into attention' as the novelist Steven Millhauser writes, in describing his own fascination with miniature things. They force us to double take: too-small things arrest the everyday with their incongruity, they upset our regular worlds, those landscapes and objects that we almost stop seeing the more comfortable we become within and beside them, the more often we move through them. Tiny things can bring us back to wonder, to surprise, to a more completely attentive engagement with the world.

But to actually
be
miniature, to be a smaller model of a naturally-existing thing is to fall under this kind of attention, this arrested gaze. It is to become something unusual, somehow out of place, something not quite right. To be miniature is to be the strange source of this shock and wonder in others, of fascination and unease at once, because as much as our shrunken, tiny bodies alarm the people who love us – as well as those we simply walk past – as much as they recoil from our sharpened shoulderblades and protruding joints, there's also a morbid kind of fascination that's always there as well. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me that they simply don't know how I
do
it.
I'd just get too hungry
or
I just love food too much,
they say.

I'll never forget that visible flinch, the whipped-around
heads, even as I know now that I do it – flinch, stare, look backwards – too. My own attention to too-small bodies, though, is tinged with a terrible sadness, and also a shameful but profound envy: things were simpler then, when I was underweight and hungry, my body seems to say. I didn't have to think or feel at all.

Miniatures, too-small things, are always scale models; they do not exist except as a representation of something else, or more precisely, as an exemplar of something bigger and less carefully-crafted, less constructed. They are not real, that is, not in and of themselves. A friend once referred to me, at my sickest, as a shadow of my former self, a thing less real because smaller, and ghosted by the larger object that my miniature self had been modelled from. (I sometimes think that, in this sense, I've become hyper-real, because the original referent, my healthy, larger body, has been lost for so long now; even I no longer remember how it looked or felt or moved.)

To be miniature, then, is to occupy space differently, and especially, pointedly, to have a different occupation of public space. We disturb it with our discrepancy, even as our smallness means we that we occupy less of it. I think sometimes that the drive to hunger, the drive towards smallness, is about precisely this: we feel so uncertain, so anxious about our rightful space within the world, that we try to take up as little of it as possible. It is a drive to disappear that can only ever succeed in making us more prominent, more visible because it makes us as different and offensive on the outside as we so often feel we are at heart.

But the strangest thing about miniature objects is, I think, the idea of their craftedness, or careful construction, an unreality or unnaturalness that's utterly unsettling because it has to be so detailed and precise. There's real skill, exceptional care and time involved in making miniatures.

It was at the end of the nineteenth century, in the early years of the photograph, the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction, that miniatures as objects first became popular. The poet and essayist Susan Stewart points out that some of the earliest miniatures were books, specifically Bibles, and that these were first produced almost as elaborate business cards, as evidence of the bookbinder's skill. Unlike a full-sized and functional, mechanically-produced object, a miniature must be fastidiously and individually made, and the smaller the object is, the more precision is required in its construction, because any tiny errors or faults in a miniature object take on a far larger scale. I know this preoccupies so many of the men and women I have met in hospitals and clinics, who feel that the smaller their bodies become, the more closely they approach precision and perfection.

The early nineteenth century was also the era of the first jewellery lockets, and of eye-portraits, tiny commissioned paintings of a loved one's eye worn on a brooch hidden within the folds of the lover's clothes. These were miniatures created as tokens of memory or desire, worn close to the body, the scaled-down likeness of a lover capable of being secretly contained and carried, kept metaphorically close at all times. By the Victorian era, barely three decades later,
the first dollhouses were becoming wildly fashionable, with sets of miniature furniture, minute but fully-functional sash windows, four-poster beds with cushions and curtains, wardrobes that opened onto tiny lace dresses for the scaled-down human figures that might occupy the rooms.

Victorian dollhouses, importantly, were usually made to order, as accurate representations of the true-sized houses that they would finally be installed in; they were an eerily realistic set stage or portrait of the possessions, environment and accoutrements (‘Honey, I shrunk the kids!') of the people who commissioned them. There's a strange kind of vanity at play here, but also an accountability: because they are so small, all of the objects can be seen at once, ordered and in place; because the parts are miniature, the whole can be perceived complete. This too is a by-product of craftedness: it is discernibly and assuredly finite. We perceive miniature objects, always, in their entirety, no detail is invisible or able to surprise us, there's no part of them that's hidden, or beyond our range or reach. We know their whole. We hold their mystery, complete.

Perhaps what miniature objects offer us, then, are borders, those very things that it can be so hard to comprehend for our own selves, and our own lives. These are borders that are impermeable in a way that people aren't, or can't be, operating within the social world, and in public: almost every critic of the miniature is quick to point out that Lilliput, Swift's
exemplary miniature world, is an island – as indeed no man can be. Smallness preserves, then, an interior, inviolable and precise, a private world that is steady and safe, however limited and constricted it may also be. Like hunger, it marks out something that we can control and own. The miniature is never messy – it is neat, it is trim and it is dear.

It's just these borders, this ability to perceive things whole, that Gaston Bachelard refers to when he writes, ‘the better I am at miniaturising the world, the better I possess it,' a sentence that stopped me in my tracks when I first read it. This too is my experience of hunger – because it narrows the world so minutely and completely, because it causes such an intensity of focus within the malnourished brain, the world seems to shrink, just as the body does, and by doing so, it seems to come back under our command. It becomes small enough, narrow enough, for us to handle; it can't hurt us any more. Even our dreams are dreams of food. Of course, this is a false and contradictory kind of command: the more control we try to exert over our eating and our food, the more our illness asserts itself and the less able we are to operate autonomously, to make actual choices, uninformed by anxiety or terror, uninfluenced by the noise the illness makes inside our heads. We possess the world, perhaps, but in the process we are dispossessed of our own selves.

And yet this narrowing of focus, this ‘detail-orientated thinking', as the psychological term has it, has been the one
by-product of hunger that I have struggled most with, as I've tried to re-find and redefine my self and my life without it. Because detail has for so long been the stuff and substance of my poetry, my craft: the accrual of small, odd things, contradictory things, the things that undercut or illuminate the social world. It has always been detail that I've thought makes the worlds we write specific, poignant and, in essence, poetic. And it's hard even to contemplate that my writing, the thing I feel has kept me sane, may very well have been based on nothing more than cognitive pathology.

In hospital, this change to our brains was explained to us with handouts:
Being good at focusing on details can be considered a strength and there are jobs which will particularly require this skill, for example, proofreading a document.
In hospital, I read this and I was relieved. Because I'm a terrible proof-reader, and was worst when I was at my sickest, I thought at the time, this ‘detail-focused thinking' must not be a problem for me. Because one small detail didn't fit, that is, I rejected the entire concept – although I didn't realise this at the time.

But afterwards, for months, I was sure that if I lost this aspect of my hunger, I would lose my writing too, and I couldn't contemplate how adrift I'd be without both anchors. I already felt like an unmoulded jelly, exposed to the air and barely holding together. Bachelard again: ‘To have experienced a miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world, and helps me resist the dissolution of the surrounding landscape.'

The scale of the surrounding world, even the scale of a
single human life, is nothing short of terrifying. Our worlds, our lives, are far too big to see the outline of, too big to find a shape for, too big to map or name or know. We can't conceive or perceive the world, much less our place within it; we can't contain its contradictions and variations, its overwhelming possibilities and changeability. But we can plan and re-plan our meals and the exact time that we will eat them. We can measure out portions of rice in teaspoons, divide apples into sixteen even pieces, we can count every chew before we swallow. With a dollhouse-sized world, a narrowed-down, miniature world, all of this changes.

So too, perhaps, with our bodies: if they are small enough, or fraught enough to see or feel in their entirety, we can be sure that they exist and we can be certain of their borders – and by extension, we can know the selves that they carry with certainty. We're no longer porous, no longer soluble, no longer undefined and contaminable; we are safe, at last.

Yet maintaining our own borders, our inviolability is also one of the tragedies of anorexia. People who are impermeable cannot open themselves to love, can't bear the vulnerability that is necessary for any real intimacy to take place. I was thirty years old, and well into my third hospital program, before I entered into my first relationship (my previous dating record had been six weeks); even then, I'd stiffen, sometimes, when my boyfriend wound his arm around me when we walked along the streets near where he lived, on footpaths
lined with flowering cherries and art deco apartment blocks. One afternoon, early on, he said, ‘I thought at first you didn't like me doing this, but it's just that you're not used to it, right?' and I couldn't tell him that I wasn't, that even this simple gesture was one I'd never received before. I was conscious of the people walking past us, thinking that they could see, could tell, we were
together,
whatever that might mean, and it made me feel exposed and somehow examined. One of his friends, too, warned him that he'd noticed it was never me who touched him first, and he thought it meant I wasn't really interested. It took months for me to learn to say sweet nothings, rather than just leave them bursting in my chest; instead, I texted photos of poems that might say them for me – the first of which was titled ‘What She Could Not Tell Him'. I remember hesitating, still, because the sentiment felt too revealing, as if even other peoples' words might show too much. It feels too risky, sometimes still, to give up borders, because without them I'm not sure that I won't just dissolve.

But really
possessing
the miniature, I think, means more than just fully perceiving it, even more than being it, or feeling its borders, however powerful these experiences may be. We can hold miniatures in our hands. We can move and manipulate them; unlike their true-sized counterparts, we can physically, as well as metaphorically, grasp them, just like the Victorians did with their lockets and love tokens. Millhauser writes about this power of the miniature as representing ‘the universe in graspable form…a desire to possess the world
more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen'; another critic, Melinda Alliker-Rabb, calls it a ‘renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions'. A miniature world is at our mercy, we are no longer at the mercy of the world. ‘We are teased out of the world of terror and death,' writes Millhauser, ‘and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God.'

But being small in itself is not being God; being miniaturised is being seated at the opposite end of this equation. I am the cause of the enchantment, rather than falling under its spell. I forget, sometimes, that I'm not the same size as most of the people around me, that the perception that I've normalised within my self is so irregular. I'm often shocked when I catch my reflection in a dark window or see a photo of myself within a crowd and am reminded, suddenly, of my own disparity. Yet even this perspective has a strange and almost perverse power, this too has an allure. Even as hunger is a striving for control, for mastery over the world, for agency, our miniaturised bodies become things that can be grasped and moved and repositioned, little things that can be held and controlled. I have friends who always raise me off my feet when they hug me, who cart me around, piggybacked, when they're horsing about or less than sober, I have had lovers (albeit few and often far between) who've delighted in lifting me up and carrying my small body; most of them were also short themselves. It's a kind of surrender, a very sensual one at that, and such surrender,
such giving up or in or over can be an incredible relief.