Today I learn about Impossible Bottles.
Have you read about the painstaking process of creating impossible scenes inside bottles (the ones with tiny, tiny necks)? These bottles are “impossible” because they showcase objects that could not possibly fit through the opening of the bottle.
Maybe you’ve seen them. Ships, knots, playing cards, tennis balls, coins, various toys. I learn that the creators take apart these objects and then patiently and carefully reassemble them inside the bottle using special long tools. Normally, in the case of ships or cards, the artist collapses and folds the objects to fit them through the opening. Once inside the wide, round part of the bottle, the artist then pulls a string to coax the object back to its normal position.
Even when knowing the technique of it all, viewers sit dumfounded over how these scenes came to be. It’s impossible. It seems like magic. The object simply cannot fit inside the neck of the bottle, so that’s that.
Once I learned how the artists do it, I realized that the impossible things actually make sense when understood from the artist’s point of view. He knows what I don’t know. He has tools I know nothing about.
This impossible scenario that I cannot imagine actually isn’t impossible. As I think about fitting things into my life or wondering how something seemingly impossible will come about, I remember the Artist with tools I know nothing about.
Of course He’d put that thing into my life within boundaries that cannot possibly hold it. He’s making good art of me.