Mosaics

bits beget monoliths

The floors and ceilings that dazzled me as I traveled in Greece and Italy. The evanescent pictures I pressed, as a girl, into sandcastle walls with bits of broken shell. The station signage of the NYC Subway system. The artist Jack Whitten's furious Black Monoliths (above left, and on display at MoMA during the Summer of 2025).

Dizzying and gorgeous, equally if differently 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, and not just the most obviously fractured ones. The stories, chapters or poems in certain volumes -- Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination, Sylvia Plath's Ariel, and Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton — come to mind as exquisite examples among fathomlessly many written mosaicisms. Mosaics are at work 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 they left a smattering of their genetics behind in the 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? Some other sort of modules?

If so, what’s your medium (or media)?

What’s your matrix? It could be the empty set of gravity, as at the Roman Colloseum, no sticking stuff required, just precision and perhaps a keystone? Or some self-obfuscating cement like the stuff that marries the black and white checkers of my early 20th-century bathroom floor? Or a paradoxical Kintsugi that makes the broken beautiful? Even among mortars, the choices are more numerous than the tesserae of Pompeii.

And how do we decide when a chopped, assembled, mortared, mosaic structure makes more sense than a continuous, contiguous realism?

There’s not exactly an answer to this, but for me, merely asking the question can be inspiring. It often begets decisions and creations that are greater than their parts.

Is it time to get out your jigsaw, or your sledgehammer?