If You Don’t Slow Down, You’ll Miss It: A Closer Look at Life in “No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity” https://ift.tt/lHXKD0C
In No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene, there is an attentiveness given to the smallest, and sometimes strangest, moments in life. A dog taking off down a beach. Designing your own shark on a computer. Dressing up a model of a giant sloth for holidays. A Marilyn Monroe-inspired balloon dress. Conversations with orchards and oak trees. Through 26 illustrated essays, Greene explores matters of both humans and animals, the simple and the weird, making meaning in the most unexpected moments that may challenge and reshape the ways we look at life.
Greene, author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, embarks on a mindful meditation on what it means to be alive throughout No Less Strange or Wonderful. While the 26 essays in the book are all of varying length, each of them takes a deep dive into some of life’s most mundane moments, with Greene offering a careful analysis on the things that matter most in life — love, death, nature, human connection. Opening herself to all the possibilities in any given moment, Greene often gives space for her curiosity to magically guide her on adventures, challenging “what is” with “what could be.”
In the essay “Intelligent Design,” the challenges Greene poses to “what is” can be most easily seen. Illustrated with strange-looking sharks, the essay is a small moment in time where Greene attempts to design a shark on a computer, selecting various options that generate an image at the end. When the end result is not what she intended to make, Greene tries again: selecting different options, making different combinations, refusing “to believe that there is a shark for any matrix [she] might configure, that nature has made a shark for every niche.” With each implausible attempt, her shark goes “boom” and explodes on the screen, the computer asking if Greene “would like to try again?” And Greene does, standing just a little bit taller as “I successfully explode shark after shark.”
While “Intelligent Design” is a fairly straightforward, brief essay that uses curiosity and imagination to challenge what we think we know is real in the world, other essays immerse readers in strange stories more fully, taking longer to breathe out surprising observations.
A simple story about a dress, “Until It Pops” explores the complexities of a dress made entirely from balloons, as well as the implications of a “latex” boundary. Engineered by “balloon-twisting royalty” Laura, who wants to make a dress for Greene, the essay is structured in vignettes that move between moments from Greene’s trip with Laura to the Annual Balloon Twister’s convention to curiosities about the dress and the history of “latex.” In one vignette, Greene recounts a dress shopping experience in New York City. While a dress looks good on her, Greene doesn’t like it — a fact easily seen by Chama, a man who offers to adjust the dress for Greene. During the process, Chama shares more about the shop, how he got into designing, and fabrics. Walking out an hour later, Greene realizes after this small moment: “Why buy a dress, when you can buy a story?” It is this mindful meditation on the present moment that opens up a new approach to life, one that is grounded in the lived moments rather than the objects we carry with us.
This refreshing observation permeates Greene’s book, both directly and indirectly. In “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” Greene interacts with Bo Gerard, a former comedy magician and unforgettable Scrooge performer who gave up interactive entertainment. With his work grounded on connecting with audience members, technology’s growing presence shifted human interaction to the digital space and left audiences void of much desire to interact in person; they just wanted a show. Yet, Gerard states,
“The magic was never the substance of the act … . It was always a conduit, a connection, an avenue to give and take, the thing you could see that allowed you to tap into something you couldn’t otherwise access.”
These experiences that Greene captures on the page prioritize the experience, where she stays present and curious in these moments, and it is through this curiosity and willingness to be open to all possibilities that Greene is able to make profound meaning of the most mundane things in life.
Throughout other essays in No Less Strange or Wonderful, Greene explores how “at any turn we might stumble on something so stunning it takes us out of ourselves for a moment” (“Wild Chilean Baby Pears”), raises questions on what we may miss in life (“Hoax”), and opens up to the magic of The Universe (“On Letting the Universe In”). Yet, despite an essay’s length, structure, or illustrations, these essays collectively require you to slow down, to join Greene on her mindful meditations and wondrous curiosity.
The way in which No Less Strange of Wonderful calls for attentiveness and openness presents its own set of challenges — as the need for readers to be mindful in the present moment of Greene’s curiosities may not be too familiar (or comfortable). This pull between wanting more of Greene’s surprising insights from simple and strange moments often conflicted with the necessity for me to fully immerse myself in these essays. However, I quickly learned that if I did not slow down and take a closer look into No Less Strange or Wonderful, I was likely to miss the magic that Greene has hidden inside.
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