Mosaics
when bits and pieces beget monoliths
Floors and ceilings that dazzled me as I traveled in Greece and Italy. Evanescent pictures I created in the sand as a girl with bits of broken shell. The station signage of the NYC Subway system. Jack Whitten's furious Black Monoliths (on display at MoMA through early August).
Dizzying and gorgeous, equally compelling up close and at a distance, mosaics transfix me more than almost any other form. They are simple and profound, delicate yet durable, and absolutely everywhere, once you start to look for them — and not just literally, in tiled images. The crop up all over the place in literature in texts. The stories, chapters or poems in certain volumes -- Eady's Brutal Imagination, Plath's Ariel, and Thorpe’s Ulverton — come to mind as equisite examples among fathomlessly many others of written mosaicisms, where elements repeat, reduplicate, vary, evolve and differ, while always interacting and interlocking with their mates, making up some larger whole. The bits of a successful mosaic shine alone yet mean more in concert, as do the six nested stories of my favorite contemporary novel, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.
And what to make of the secret mosaics of our bodies, our hidden ancestries: My daughter’s twin, vanished in utero but persistent because she left a smattering of her genetics behind in her fraternal survivor. How many sisters or brothers never born nevertheless express themselves in a birthmark, a hairy patch, a Bowie eye, my otherwise strapping cousin’s Tetrology of Fallot....
The artist Jack Whitten wrote of his own mosaic process: "When I break it down into these little bits that I work with, it’s like a pixel. Like each tesserae is a piece of light. . . . The message is coded into the process.” His materials for "Black Monolith II (Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man)" (above, left) included acrylic, molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, and razor blade on canvas! He made his tiles himself, first fabricating sheets of color, then smashing them to smithereens and reassembling them into images of remarkable coherence, mystery and depth.
How can we as writers do what Whitten did, put that onion, that rust, that rage — all our disparate yet intimately connected fragments into our texts? How can we make a monolith of a pile of food scraps and trash?
Are you building your story in pieces? In tiles? Could you be? Should you be? Might doing so give you a formal freedom you’ve only dreamt of but never known how to achieve? When might this sort of chopped and mortared structure make sense, as opposed, say, to a more continuous, contiguous realism?
This afternoon (6/26/25 at 5 pm EDT), join me in The 24-Hour Room’s Lounge to talk about literary mosaics, or feel free to leave a note about ways you’ve deployed mosaicism in your writing, or mentioning your favorite writers who have.