I remember walking through the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havannah with Rob and stopping in front of this painting. I was just mesmerized. I made Rob gaze into it too. It’s an enormous painting, filling a wall, and finely detailed, as if each leaf in the jungle is in hyper-focus.
I wanted to start this issue of Notions & Notes with Sánchez because of how he uses the motif of mirrors, natural forms in balance, reflecting each other. The mirrors and mirrored forms in his paintings are in harmony. They speak to each other.
The visual language of Tomás Sánchez’s landscapes reminds me of this Zach Schomburg poem from his book Fjords Vol 1.
Sunna No Onna
By Zachary Schomburg
A dune is a lot like a fjord. They move so slowly you can’t see them move, and they have many small things in them, like saw beetles, or woodbores. When the darkness falls, and no one is around, they talk to each other very quietly. Fjords to other fjords, dunes to other dunes. Like I said, there’s little difference. I’m a fjord, says a fjord. I’m a dune, says a dune. Their lives are lived proving their nature without the proper certification. I am a true dune, I am a true fjord, and how I long only to be a dune, and how I long only to be a fjord. You think it’s easy to be sealed inside yourself, like a person inside a person, holding onto your secret name like your last glass of water? Look at you go, how you go to your own funeral forever.
Mirrors are disorienting—when you look into a mirror it holds a false double of the self. Mirrors contain multitudes.
I’ve always loved reading, but I remember the first time I read Borges I realized what writing was capable of making me feel and think. Mirrors, conceptual or literal, appear in many of his stories as ways of doubling reality or troubling its definitions. Although he’s said “Mirrors and copulation are abominable since they both multiply the numbers of men,” Borges made mirrors a trademark. In “Borges and I,” the mirroring is in form, like Sánchez’s cloud and lake or Schomberg’s fjords and dunes, but with two versions of the self, his outer and inner self.
Borges and I
By Jorge Louis Borges
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
I think this poem is in the same spirit as the Borges piece in that there are multiple selves and it’s unclear which self can claim authenticity. I love this poem.
Replica
By Mary Ruefle
As part of his Everyday project, Noah Kalina takes a daily self-portrait. At 7,777 days or 21 years, he combined these photos in collaboration with a programmer who aligned the features of his face. They average 60 faces a frame so he ages a couple of months each second. In the video, Kalina looks at the viewer as if looking into a mirror—when you look into a mirror, you see lies beyond your face, but instead of his own face in a mirror, it’s the viewer Kalina looks into. Go here to see a similar time-lapse where the photos are more distinct.
A few years ago I saw an exhibit at Mass MoCA and took a photo of a label for a project. I wish I could tell you who the artist is or what the project was. I’m including it here, well, because I love the writing, but also because Pauline’s pulse makes a kind of portrait, an alternate visual reality to that of her face or body, and it is as fragile and ephemeral as any mirrored reflection. Here’s my transcript of the label:
The Pulse Armed With a Pen: Time Lends Love Back
The desire of one partner to know, hear, or feel another’s heart is such a simple but fundamental human hunger. In medicine there are references to changes in pulse and heart rate due to heartbreak dating back thousands of years, and the phenomenon must certainly extend back before recorded history. One could argue that the driving force behind a great deal of the literature, music, and art created throughout history has been a craving to know the depths of a partner’s heart. Part of our fascination, explored through art, religion, and eventually science, has been the mystery of its movements, which were thought to be mystical, ephemeral, unrepeatable, and forever hidden from our view.
A forgotten but dramatic chapter in this human quest was added at 3:00 PM on September 20, 1854, when Geman physiologist Karl Vierordt recorded a “pulse picture” of his wife Pauline, becoming the first human to see his partner’s pulse, and hence heartbeat, as movement in real time. Less than a year earlier, he’d introduced his sphymograph, or “pulse writer'",” which for the first time allowed scientists to convert the movements of the heart into a visible form that could be permanently written on a medium. Using the same premise as a modern day blood pressure device, Vierordt devised a way for a pulsing artery to activate a lever attached to a stylus for inscription on a moving piece of paper, blackened with particles of soot, producing a white-on-black curvilinear tracing. This was a radical breakthrough, as the ability to detect, record, and visualize the inner workings of a still-beating human heart seemed well beyond the reach of science.
In a beautiful coincidence, practicalities accidentally produced a poetic moment of astounding fragility. Driven to make adaptations to his device because he could not find a stlus that was gentle and responsive enough (other attempts ripped the paper), Vierordt turned to the most delicate things he could find: a human hair and soot from a candle flame. So the first time one partner gazed upon the movement of the other’s heart, it was traced by a single human hair in the residue of a flame that burned and was extinguished 161 years ago. Modern technology now allows us to listen in on Frau Vierordt’s pulse as a new form of intimacy is revealed to the world.
No exploration of mirrors would be complete without L’année Derniére à Marienbad. As Robbe-Grillet describes in his introduction to the published screenplay, Last Year at Marienbad is “an attempt to construct a purely mental space and time—those of dreams, perhaps, or of memory, those of any effective life—without excessive insistence on the traditional relations of cause and effect, nor on an absolute time sequence in narrative.”
It is an extremely French film, without any grounding plot, multiple possible narrative truths, and a vague love triangle. Every room at Marienbad seems to contain large mirrors and the decadent party-goers seem to be ghosts of memories. Take a look at the trailer to get a better sense of how the cinematography uses mirrors. The scene below is surreal and beautiful. In it, mirrors freeze the movement of time.
Ghost stories, movie funhouse scenes, and conceptual art all make use of the unsettling mirror trope. Mirrors bend time and space and make an unreality. They’re a portal to another world.
I particularly love this funhouse scene from (the vastly underappreciated) Harley Quinn movie, Birds of Prey.
I dare you to listen to Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” and not want to dance a little. I had no idea how weird and cool the music video was until now. For me, the song created one of those magic moments shared with strangers. I was staying in Provincetown in dead cold January, spending hours completely absorbed in reshaping my manuscript, ignoring time, and occasionally taking breaks to walk through otherworldly sand dunes or stroll down the middle of completely empty Commercial Street looking up at stars made more crisp by the bitter cold. One night, I emerged and went to one of my favorite PTown sandwich places. There were just a few of us lingering over our plates at the end of the night. This song came on. Each of us sort of smiled, maybe started to sing quietly, then a little dancing, then really dancing, and we hugged each other good night when it ended.