Would she stick with a basic WordPress blog and never respond to comments? Or would she be a Duolingo addict, posting unlocked achievements to Facebook friends and family in between sharing new work? She wanted her poems to be read—what is a poem without a reader?—but, like many of the female writers whose work is judged the the finest of their times long after their demise, circumstances were decidedly against her. By the time the quality of her poems became visible to publishers and critics, she was long gone. Somehow you get the impression she knew her own worth regardless.
There are risks and rewards to sharing online. Everyone has vulnerabilities, and owning your vulnerability can be a super-power of sorts. It is a drive which brings you into conflict with the instinct for self-preservation, homeostasis and energy conservation, but we must be able to exercise some conscious influence over that conflict. I’ve made up my mind that I’ve been rather too attuned to the risks and downsides. Sharing the shareable parts of what I spend my time doing seems to help me to carry on creating, and enjoy the process even more than when I was doing the same things but mostly in secret. So, let’s go full digital zeitgeist. Why not? Let’s not be half-arsed about it. It’s later than you think.
If you see my talking head popping up here and there, its because the penny finally dropped that the selfie screen—if shared—is a mirror, and artists have always been preoccupied with mirrors as a metaphor for the value of art. In art, we get to see who we are. Putting art into the world is an inherently generous act—just imagine life without the tidal clutter of books, music, painting, sculpture, and the rest. It might not be a stretch to say that generosity more often enriches the lives of those who engage with it, than the artist’s life, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Consider The Portrait of a Mirror by a. natasha joukovsky in which the author builds a literary infinity mirror around canonical paintings from the European tradition. Consider the Arte Povera movement’s Giuseppe Penone capturing a selfie in mirrored contact lenses reflecting Italy in the nineteen sixties. Consider Nico offering her persona as a karmic mirror for Velvet Underground listeners. Consider Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms. Consider Caroline Polachek’s “you” opening the door to another door to another door…
“Who is the you
who I sing to
when the house is empty?”
…which prompts my imagination to loop back around to Nico’s final album, on which the singer within the song finds that No One Is There to hear him. But the song endures. The Marble Index has been posthumously judged a classic. How much Dickinson energy is she giving on the cover? She knew her own worth. She knew the world would catch up, eventually, once the cultural phenomenon hereby to be known as the Medusa Devaluation Reflex had spent itself. No, wait—the Medusa Slay Reflex.
In art’s mirrors we fish out proof of our own existence, electrifying reminders of our own aliveness, stimuli for hyper-awareness, and, at the same time, signs pointing to the unacknowledged, forgotten, or longed-for aspects of ourselves. Everyday human magic. Inherently worthwhile. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with wanting—and needing—to be seen. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just struggling with their own stuff. Bless, forgive, carry on. Let your works, and plays, be seen.
Enjoy a playlist on the theme of mirrors.
Wishing you all the flow.
Musing on meaning since 2024 