∞ n l i n e

Self-view on zoom is disturbing so I deactivate it most of the time. When my connection is spotty however, I leave it on. The corroded signal allows for a delay and fragmentation in the reflection. I see myself across a prior instant, stuttering and steadying across time into semi existence. My mind often goes back to a lecture I attended here at Yale when gatherings could take place in physical space and somewhere in physical space is the note I took in a journal, that may also exist somewhere above my thigh in my phone as a photograph. I do not recall the speaker, and he himself was quoting a friend, who is also a philosopher, who never smiled or laughed, but once used the mirrored reflection as an analogy. He had said it wasn’t true what we thought about vampires, not casting a reflection, this misconception arises because they are so ancient that pausing momentarily in front of a mirror is not long enough a span for the light to return from its eons long journey. Were the being patient enough stand in front of that mirror sure enough their reflection would materialize.

We are also wrong about mirrors on a fundamental level. We default to thinking that the image is flipped, or inverted. But the mirror does not flip us or invert us. Upon its surface we are pulled through, nose against the glass, the back of the skull collapses inward towards that nearly non existent pressure point of nose on glass. Collapses in closer to that point until it is beyond flesh, beyond glass, into a mirrored realm, the back of the skull again equidistant from that original point of flesh on glass but now on the other side.