Life in Microcosm
My first wife, Mary, had a penchant for collecting miniatures. I always found that somewhat humorous since no one would accuse me of being a miniature anything. But she would always hunt for miniature items either as remembrance for life events or even just everyday life. She would keep her miniatures with little bits of sticky putty in upright and refinished printers drawers that used to hold small lead letters used in typesetting. Those printers drawers would be proudly displayed on the wall and wine could spend hours looking at all the little items they held, each one reproduced in excruciating detail. there is something very pleasing about looking at things in miniature. It helps us to understand the importance of the form and shape of all the things in our lives that we tend to ignore on a day-in-day-out basis. I always thought Mary’s hobby was very neat and it is clear she is not alone in this collecting arena since there always seems to be someone making and selling miniature items. You can attach some of this hobby space to the building of doll houses for little girls, but it goes well beyond that. The little boy equivalent is the ubiquitous train set. Who among us has not fantasized about the miniature train set with little towns, stations, commercial and country scenes and all manner of cars, trucks and little people walking around the faux landscape? We all like imagining ourselves shrunk down to miniature scale and enjoying our little lives. There have been countless stories and movies on related subjects, perhaps starting with the 1726 publishing of Gulliver’s Travels.
A few years ago, one of my attractions friends helped a new company, called Gulliver’s Gate, launch itself in the basement of the old New York Times “Grey Lady” building at Times Square between 43rd and 44th Streets. Strangely enough, it was building space I used to control in my old AFI management days. It went on to get sold to the Kushner Companies and is now in the portfolio of Jared and Ivanka, strangely enough. That building is a challenging space to utilize. It seems so valuable because it is so near Times Square, the hub of New York City tourist activity, but it is just enough off of Times Square to be challenging to lease for the rents one wants to achieve to make the building productive. Originally, we leased the space to an exposition company that would bring everything from the Titanic to the DaVinci exhibits to the public. The big, cavernous basement space where the old printing presses for the Times were housed was perfect space for expositions because it was so expansive and didn’t need to have exterior sunlight. Gulliver’s Gate built out a vast display of the entire world in miniature. This is the sort of attraction which has been offered to the public in many different ways all around the world. I recall that there is a place called Madurodam near The Hague (the seat of Dutch government and the international courts) in the Netherlands that has been around for seventy years, enthralling children with its miniature village. Gulliver’s Gate offered a 3-D printing booth where you can stand and have a 360-degree replica made of you in miniature out of resin. Kim and I visited the attraction and had a miniature of ourselves made. It sits on our office shelves, memorializing how the two of us look in 3-D miniature. Its an interesting curio that is amazingly detailed and accurate, even capturing a small neck scar I got when I was fourteen. I have decided that I look much better in miniature than I do in full-grown real life.
I am typing this story on my iPad sitting at my glass-top curio table in my office. This table was designed and fabricated by me about thirty years ago. It has a ash wood tray that sits below a large square glass table set on a steel frame. I have filled the tray with black sand for contrast and as a bed in which I have placed my numerous oddities and curios with an emphasis on antiquities (Pre-Colombian art and ancient Phoenician amphorae shards), with rare stone pyramids and a series of planetary miniatures I acquired somewhere along the way. I can entertain myself for long stretches of time looking at and dreaming about the items in this bed of black sand. They are randomly placed to add to the curiosity of the “exhibit” and in many ways, the gathering of items in this table represents my life in all its randomness and curiosity. For some reason, the miniature planet Earth sits in a Pre-Colombian pottery bowl in a manner that highlights its miniature exactness to its best. I haven’t yet figured out the symbolism of that placement, but it certainly seems meaningful.
The more I think about life in microcosm that is represented in these exhibits ranging from Madurodam to Gulliver’s Gate to my curio table, the more I wonder about what makes these mixture worlds so intriguing to us as humans. I suspect its all about getting a grip on the meaning of life. It is somehow easier to grapple with the complexities of the universe if we miniaturize it. We can look at it from all sides and we can control it better in this size and form. It makes everything seem more understandable, or at least that’s how I interpret it. Maybe we need to take a lesson from Mary and her miniature collecting. Maybe its all just about taking what is big and uncontrollable and shrinking it down to put it in perspective and in its place on the shelf. God knows, seeing myself in miniature helped me feel better about myself and perhaps finally a bit more controllable. I should note for the record that Gulliver’s Gate had an offering wherein if you paid for a 3-D miniature of yourself, you would not only get your own copy to take home, but you would also have your form placed anywhere on their world that suited you and your self-image. That was a daunting choice for me. Should I place myself in Latin America or Rome to symbolize my upbringing? Should I place myself out in Utah where I revived and enjoyed my pastimes of skiing and motorcycling for fifteen years? I finally decided to have Kim and I placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It seemed doubly appropriate since I lived on Staten Island at the time and had an unobstructed view of the Statue and it was a symbol that highlighted my lifelong yearning to be an American. What could be more American than the Statue of Liberty?
Life is long and it is complex, no matter how we try to simplify our lives. I don’t know all the reasons why we tend to want to shrink things down and so very much enjoy miniaturizing our lives, but we seem to enjoy life so much that we want to treasure life in microcosm.