07.24.04| the mirror project

     Snowing on the lake
snowing on the limbs of the elms
     snowing on spring snow.
—Richard Wright Haiku: This Other World, #443

Recently an online web installation called the Mirror Project accepted one of my photos for their galleries. At the website, people are invited to post pictures of themselves in mirrors or reflective surfaces.

The submitted picture displays me in 1989, during the last summer I lived in Minneapolis, a period of limbo: in-between jobs, different cities, as if I were living in an endless white silence of a blizzard.

In one sense, during my mid-twenties, I needed a stronger definition of self, —or maybe clarification is a better word. I needed a clearer picture of who I was as I sometimes wandered across the city and over the bridge where the poet John Berryman jumped to his death.

While living in Minneapolis, entire nights were spent drinking instant coffee, painting dark abstractions on pulled canvases, or writing long poems about a small country, an island nation of my own creation. Afterwards, the morning light seemed more a figment of imagination, or a dreamscape unfolding.

Fifteen years later, looking at the few pictures in the series, they all carry a heavy absence, a stark minimalism. Although they were meant as an autobiographical record, volumes of information remain left out, undisclosed. The death of my younger brother for instance. Or the drama of living with an alcoholic. Or the inner frustration coiled around my personality.

Yet, what they do show is a reality of a moment. A brief second taken from a strand of days. A period of waiting.

Other pictures from this series: