[Video: Photorealist artist Melissa Cooke serves as her own model for a “drawing” of a sneering but otherwise Chaplinesque character. As I understand this light-hearted “making-of” demonstration, she’s excerpting bits and pieces of her various poses, costumes, facial expressions, and such, and amalgamating them into a single image.]
From whiskey river:
Everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn’t it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to conceal and ward off the flickering, disturbing haste because it could be impossible to live with all the time. Isn’t every exchange of looks between people like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travelers passing one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the shock of air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter? Don’t our looks bounce off others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and imagined qualities? Isn’t it true that it’s not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?
(Pascal Mercier)
…and:
Should we be grateful for the protection that guards us from the strangeness of one another? And for the freedom it makes possible? How would it be if we confronted each other unprotected by the double refraction represented by the interpreted body? If, because nothing separating and adulterating stood between us, we tumbled into each other?
(Pascal Mercier [source: ibid])
…and:
When I surprise myself in the depths of the mirror I get a fright. I can hardly believe that I have limits, that I am cut out and defined. I feel scattered in the air, thinking inside other beings, living in things beyond myself. When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open at the pale mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.
(Clarice Lispector [source])
Not from whiskey river:
A Glass of Water
Un seul verre d’eau éclaire le monde* — Cocteau
Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbours
their reception.
Outside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors
the exception
of city from sky, hills snug with housesand a glass of water standing on the railing,
half empty or half full. In the failingafternoon light
brightening buildings counterpoint the darkness,
glinting upside-
down inside the glass, and the newly-weds,
seen from outsidejoining hand to hand for the wedding reel,
glide under its meniscus, head over heels.
(David Musgrave [source])
…and:
Webster had passed the drugstore every morning and afternoon of nearly every weekday for twenty years, on the cross-street to and from the office. He’d been inside often, to that very corner, where the magazines were racked. So he knew: no table stood there, with no chair alongside. And on the non-existent chair, at the non-existent table, could therefore sit no moderately attractive middle-aged woman in pinstriped business garb, poring over the classifieds in an imaginary newspaper.
But facts were facts, even impossible ones. The tableau existed exactly that way — and had for four days now.
He could glimpse it only from a certain angle, from the corners of his eyes as he walked past or stood with the window to his left. To that point, he could see only the reflected sidewalk, the street, rushing pedestrians, parked cars, a steaming manhole. Beyond that point, turning to face the window, he saw the expected, the familiar, the known: hints of a mirrored street scene, but mostly the aisles of first-aid supplies and candy bars, greeting cards, the scuffed beige linoleum tiles and fluorescent lighting.
But at just the right angle, he saw her plainly. And always the same: her black-going-gray hair knotted into a croissant at the back of her head. A cardboard cup of coffee. Round, black-rimmed eyeglasses. The cramped type in the narrow columns of the page. An index fingertip moving down the columns as her lips counted silent cadence.
The fingertip: that, of the entire fantastic scene, fascinated him most. The nail had been painted in some brilliant red hue, but about half its polish had flaked away. That ragged unfinished patch, oddly, was the one bit of the composition which struck him as absurd.
He’d been wondering about that fingernail. He intended to examine it more closely this morning.
He approached the window. He pictured the moment. He’d be standing there, brow furrowed, staring down at her hand, the implausibly gone polish. She would feel his gaze. The finger suddenly motionless, she would look up over the tops of her glasses, and her absurdly hazel eyes would—
But she was not seated at the table this morning. Oh, the table itself: yes, that was there. The chair. The classifieds. But no woman. She was gone.
He moved closer, maybe in the aisle— But here the angle was all wrong. The table, chair, and newspaper vanished. A shaved-headed guy on the other side of the window was flexing the tattoos of his biceps as he thumbed through a bodybuilding magazine. Webster knew if he hesitated a split-second longer the guy would look up, catch him standing there, and then, well, something unpleasant would follow.
He backed up again, returned to the proper angle. Yes. The table and chair, the paper. Still no woman…
He suddenly thought of that fingernail again. How the absence of the paint had crystallized the unreal, focused it, made it all real.
Inside Webster’s head, something went tick.
He still saw both scenes. But the universe in which the table, chair, and paper existed suddenly seemed to have swapped identities with the street scene: those non-existent objects had taken on weight that the real world could not sustain. The real world had gone translucent, as if viewed through a window, and the table stood here before him. Yet if that were so, then (tick)—
Webster turned around.
(JES, “Diorama”)
__________________
* The phrase Un seul verre d’eau éclaire le monde translates as A single glass of water lights up (or illuminates) the world; it comes from Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée. The surrealistic phrase is one of several which emanate from a radio tuned to broadcasts from the underworld.
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