IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
/thoughts on the infinite/failure/endings/
BY AYDEN LEROUX
MAY 21: [PHONE] numina definition
pneumena
pneumena definition
[LAPTOP] leslie jamison nyt stepmothers
carmen giminez smith
be recorder carmen giminez smith
eula biss balloonists
mormon writer nonfiction
nonfiction mothers journals female writer
terry tempest williams
when women were birds
maggie smith any bones
In 1975, Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch performance artist departed from Massachusetts on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean for England. The trip, which should have taken two or three months, was to be part of an art piece called “In Search of the Miraculous.” If he succeeded in completing the journey, his thirteen-foot boat Ocean Wave would have been the smallest vessel to make the trip. Ten months after he set out, his boat was found at sea. His body, however, was never recovered and his disappearance became the stuff of legend that crystallized into a cult fascination. His earlier work dealt heavily with failure, melancholy, and death which caused rumors to circulate that he had planned his own disappearance as part of a performance for “In Search of the Miraculous.”
MAY 22: [PHONE] menya ultra menu
MAY 22: [PHONE] menya ultra menu
I still remember the day my father came home from work at New Hampshire Fish and Game and told me about “this thing called Google.” My dad was all worked up because that day at the office he had put his name into this search engine (a concept I’d never even heard of before) and found some entries about himself from old articles he had been quoted in for the local paper, Foster’s Daily Democrat. He felt famous being able to be found on the world wide web.
I asked him what the word “google” was and he told me that it meant something was infinite. The company name references “googol” which is a term in mathematics that means 10 to the power of 100. I liked all the o’s in the word and decided to name a recently acquired stuffed toy skunk with a zipper pouch in his belly Google.
MAY 23:
I asked him what the word “google” was and he told me that it meant something was infinite. The company name references “googol” which is a term in mathematics that means 10 to the power of 100. I liked all the o’s in the word and decided to name a recently acquired stuffed toy skunk with a zipper pouch in his belly Google.
MAY 23:
In her book Hourglass, nonfiction writer Dani Shapiro writes,
I often tell my students, show me your search history and I will show you your obsessions…A quick perusal of my recent search history includes carpenter bees, Carl Jung, roasted cauliflower, No. 6 clogs, coy-wolves, woodpeckers, pellet gun, Citizens of Humanity jeans, White Moustache Yogurt, Alzheimer’s, futon, Aristotle’s Poetics, yoga in Miami, restaurants in Barcelona, Dame magazine, Literary Hub, Nike Tennis Camp, Italo Calvino, and fingerless gloves. |
After reading this, I wonder what my search history would say about me. What about the days when I don’t search for anything because I’m too lost to find my way?
When I look at Shapiro’s list, her searches are all nouns. Person, place, thing. With the exception of “Alzheimer’s” it’s all concrete and I wish that more of the searches were ephemeral or untouchable in some way. Is she truly obsessed with yogurt and clogs? Google is a cursory mode of searching; obsession implies a deeper mode of interest. The list must be curated, a wunderkammer of miscellany that presents something about her identity, and I crave knowing what less presentable things she has searched for. Half the fun of reading someone’s search history is seeing the way their brain iterates to hone the search, makes errors then corrects to get closer to what they seek. In my searches, I see a repetition, a hand that is sketching lines around a thing but not quite arriving at a crisp outline.
MAY 24: [PHONE] political memoirs new yorker
amc la jolla
olivia wilde
booksmart trailer
triple sec alternatives
the gilmore sd
the gilmore san diego
the gilmore san diego bar
screening sex book
screening sex ucsd
When I look at Shapiro’s list, her searches are all nouns. Person, place, thing. With the exception of “Alzheimer’s” it’s all concrete and I wish that more of the searches were ephemeral or untouchable in some way. Is she truly obsessed with yogurt and clogs? Google is a cursory mode of searching; obsession implies a deeper mode of interest. The list must be curated, a wunderkammer of miscellany that presents something about her identity, and I crave knowing what less presentable things she has searched for. Half the fun of reading someone’s search history is seeing the way their brain iterates to hone the search, makes errors then corrects to get closer to what they seek. In my searches, I see a repetition, a hand that is sketching lines around a thing but not quite arriving at a crisp outline.
MAY 24: [PHONE] political memoirs new yorker
amc la jolla
olivia wilde
booksmart trailer
triple sec alternatives
the gilmore sd
the gilmore san diego
the gilmore san diego bar
screening sex book
screening sex ucsd
This quarter, I’m teaching an analytical writing class on the topic of internet privacy rights. In one of the books assigned, Dragnet Nation, journalist Julia Angwin tries to minimize the amount of data collected about her. She writes, “My searches are among the most sensitive information about me. If I’m looking into buying a burner phone, all my searches are about burner phones. If I’m researching an article about facial recognition technology, all my searches are about facial recognition technology. Basically, my searches are a fairly accurate predication of my future actions.” I am not a journalist like Angwin, so my searches feel less sensitive and private, though you can certainly tell what kind of research I’m doing for writing projects. Angwin stops using Google and switches to use a web browser called DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t retain data. As she does so, she realizes how easy Google makes things. For example, if she searches movie times in Google, which is tracking her location and knows where she lives, she doesn’t need to add in New York City or her neighborhood to narrow down the search. Google knows her location and nests it within the search invisibly.
You can trace many of my movements through my search history. The words become a map of sorts, a cartography of something unsaid. And yet, when both Angwin and I search movie times there’s nothing to indicate what motivates each of us. When I search amc la jolla there is no hint as to why I am going to the movies or who I am going with. You don’t see that my partner Oliver and I are trying to go to a $5 Tuesday night special but that it’s sold out. You don’t see that we have been living apart for two years, he in Texas and I in California, and that he arrived here with a Penske truck of our belongings just under a week ago. You don’t see we were trying to do something to take our minds off the fact that he has decided to go back to Texas, that our things have arrived, but some part of him never truly did.
MAY 25: [PHONE] record store
record store buy and sell
[LAPTOP] the color of pomegranates
You can trace many of my movements through my search history. The words become a map of sorts, a cartography of something unsaid. And yet, when both Angwin and I search movie times there’s nothing to indicate what motivates each of us. When I search amc la jolla there is no hint as to why I am going to the movies or who I am going with. You don’t see that my partner Oliver and I are trying to go to a $5 Tuesday night special but that it’s sold out. You don’t see that we have been living apart for two years, he in Texas and I in California, and that he arrived here with a Penske truck of our belongings just under a week ago. You don’t see we were trying to do something to take our minds off the fact that he has decided to go back to Texas, that our things have arrived, but some part of him never truly did.
MAY 25: [PHONE] record store
record store buy and sell
[LAPTOP] the color of pomegranates
Google and Wikipedia are deeply entangled—the latter often being the first hit in a search on the former. While Google is a robotic, algorithmic way of scanning the archive of the internet, Wikipedia is a collaborative repository of human knowledge. The Polish author Olga Tokarczuk writes:
|
Tocarczuk is not alone in wrestling with the failure of language, all writers must confront this at some point or another, just as they must wrestle with the how inescapable it is. As Angwin continues to try to evade her data being gathered, using DuckDuckGo forces her to think harder about her terms. Angwin finds it “jarring to have to finish typing an entire word without Google finishing it for me.” She writes, “Without Google’s suggestions, however, I found that I was less distracted to search for things I didn’t need… I had always thought of Google as a clean sheet of paper—possibly because of its nice white interface—but in fact I had molded my questions to adjust to how Google likes to answer questions.” Just as the tools we use shape how we measure things, how we think and understand concepts, the tools that we search with shape where we end up, where we find answers. In an article for the New York Times titled “Does Language Shape the Way We Think?” Guy Deutscher explores the ways language influences how humans orient to the world bodily. Deutscher explains that in some languages directions might be given using words like right and left to orient, whereas others would use the cardinal directions. He says, “These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.” Bas Jan Ader was trying to escape matter and information, to leave the geographic for the egocentric modes of orientation in order to find the edge of the horizon, the abyss, the mystery, the slippage into something unfathomable.
MAY 26: [LAPTOP] the color of pomegranates
MAY 26: [LAPTOP] the color of pomegranates
I read somewhere once a few years ago that we don’t have to know anything anymore because we all have Google and Wikipedia at our fingertips. We used to be interesting because of the knowledge we had and retained, and now we’re interesting because of how we offer commentary or criticism on it. (How fitting that I can’t find this article, didn’t retain the title or author and now can’t cite it). Anyone can sit at a restaurant or bar and find out whatever factoid they need (What year was Dolce Vita released? What is dust made of?) and keep talking. What is the price of these interruptions? Maybe we had more interesting conversations when we couldn’t know everything. When we got things wrong. When we had to play telephone constantly with our misremembered facts and misinformation.
MAY 27: [LAPTOP] On Airs, Waters and Places – Hippocrates
MAY 27: [LAPTOP] On Airs, Waters and Places – Hippocrates
The things we (I) still don’t have answers for:
Why we dream.
Why we laugh.
Dark matter.
Why we kiss.
Why we have pubic hair.
When Oliver decided it was over.
What causes gravity.
How we store and retrieve memory.
MAY 28: [PHONE] booksmart rotten tomatoes
clairmont theater
[LAPTOP] ucsd webreg
rochester new york airport
any one thing
sophie larsmon
twenty seconds then applause wen
glasstire readership
shawn wen
ucsd webreg
Why we dream.
Why we laugh.
Dark matter.
Why we kiss.
Why we have pubic hair.
When Oliver decided it was over.
What causes gravity.
How we store and retrieve memory.
MAY 28: [PHONE] booksmart rotten tomatoes
clairmont theater
[LAPTOP] ucsd webreg
rochester new york airport
any one thing
sophie larsmon
twenty seconds then applause wen
glasstire readership
shawn wen
ucsd webreg
Failure is indelibly connected to the infinite.
MAY 29: [LAPTOP] melissa febos fine arts work center workshop
MAY 29: [LAPTOP] melissa febos fine arts work center workshop
As much as I wish my search history reflected my obsessions as Shapiro promised, when I look at it, I see what a very slim picture it paints of my interests. It says: She likes movies. She likes restaurants. She likes female writers.
What is more compelling to me are the poetic moments that can happen in the oblivion of not knowing what something is. any one thing sounds strikingly vague on its own, a curious thing to search. What allure the color of pomegranates has when you imagine me taking that literally, trying to ask Google to help me understand the color of a fruit that is so strongly associated with red. If I tell you that the latter is the title of a film and the former is a theater company in London, the stanzas of searches lose some of their miraculousness.
MAY 30: [PHONE] ucsd shuttle
What is more compelling to me are the poetic moments that can happen in the oblivion of not knowing what something is. any one thing sounds strikingly vague on its own, a curious thing to search. What allure the color of pomegranates has when you imagine me taking that literally, trying to ask Google to help me understand the color of a fruit that is so strongly associated with red. If I tell you that the latter is the title of a film and the former is a theater company in London, the stanzas of searches lose some of their miraculousness.
MAY 30: [PHONE] ucsd shuttle
Any introductory nonfiction class will tell you that essay is French for to try. For me, the word “to try” quietly implies something forced. Trying is not being, trying is strained, all about the gap between aim and action. David Shields writes in Reality Hunger that memoir comes from memara (Persian) or mermer (Indo-European), meaning “to vividly wonder, to be anxious, to exhaustingly ponder.” It is “that which we think about but cannot grasp.” Memoir is more about the act of searching. Until recently, I would have said I was an essayist, focused on small attempts at things, but more and more my work feels like a reckoning, a search.
You could say Ader attempted to cross the Atlantic, but that wouldn’t be fully accurate. He was not trying to chart the ocean, he was in search of the miraculous; he was exhaustingly pursuing that which he could not grasp.
MAY 31: [PHONE] deep purple sweater
bright purple sweater
free people sweaters
big little lies season 2
[LAPTOP] wine smarties sd
You could say Ader attempted to cross the Atlantic, but that wouldn’t be fully accurate. He was not trying to chart the ocean, he was in search of the miraculous; he was exhaustingly pursuing that which he could not grasp.
MAY 31: [PHONE] deep purple sweater
bright purple sweater
free people sweaters
big little lies season 2
[LAPTOP] wine smarties sd
There is so much about my days that isn’t captured by these searches, or that is buried within them. So many hours lived that don’t come into contact with something to add to my list of questions cast into the waters of Google. Nevertheless, there are thousands of searches I’m doing outside of the digital horizon, uncertainty spilling out like salt across the table during these days.
record store buy and sell might tell you initially that I like old things, that I have a turntable. But it won’t tell you that I’m unpacking, that Oliver brought my father’s record collection with him on the journey west, that on the day this catalogue began, our ending did too.
booksmart trailer and clairmont theater might tell you that he and I go see a movie together on a Tuesday night in a cheap neighborhood. But it doesn’t tell you that he makes me dinner after a long day of teaching and we sit outside the theater the hour before at a table in the parking lot, eating salmon and Brussels sprouts out of Tupperware. It doesn’t tell you that we talk about when he’ll move out, where he’ll go next, what to do with the two bedroom we were supposed to share.
That wine smarties sd is a where I sign up for a class because people keep saying that hobbies will be a good distraction as I process our separation.
The three searches about sweaters follow a miserable day when I wandered around the mall in La Jolla and found a beautiful moss-colored cashmere sweater that was $148. I wanted to buy it, wanted the retail therapy, but couldn’t justify the extravagance.
Nowhere in these days of searches can you see a separation occurring. A thousand other searches—big and small—happening internally, not typed out through my fingertips.
JUNE 1: [PHONE] singapore
lily hoang ucsd
gossip grill
nyc pride 2019
[LAPTOP] propagate
record store buy and sell might tell you initially that I like old things, that I have a turntable. But it won’t tell you that I’m unpacking, that Oliver brought my father’s record collection with him on the journey west, that on the day this catalogue began, our ending did too.
booksmart trailer and clairmont theater might tell you that he and I go see a movie together on a Tuesday night in a cheap neighborhood. But it doesn’t tell you that he makes me dinner after a long day of teaching and we sit outside the theater the hour before at a table in the parking lot, eating salmon and Brussels sprouts out of Tupperware. It doesn’t tell you that we talk about when he’ll move out, where he’ll go next, what to do with the two bedroom we were supposed to share.
That wine smarties sd is a where I sign up for a class because people keep saying that hobbies will be a good distraction as I process our separation.
The three searches about sweaters follow a miserable day when I wandered around the mall in La Jolla and found a beautiful moss-colored cashmere sweater that was $148. I wanted to buy it, wanted the retail therapy, but couldn’t justify the extravagance.
Nowhere in these days of searches can you see a separation occurring. A thousand other searches—big and small—happening internally, not typed out through my fingertips.
JUNE 1: [PHONE] singapore
lily hoang ucsd
gossip grill
nyc pride 2019
[LAPTOP] propagate
“In Search of the Miraculous” was meant to be a triptych, the voyage across the Atlantic, being just one of three parts that would be bookended by photographs documenting Ader wandering dark streets at night with a flashlight, once in Los Angeles before his departure, and again after he arrived in Europe. He never got around to making the third photo, which was supposed to be taken somewhere in the Netherlands. It is in the incompleteness of the work that it is miraculous, for the search is never done.
The night before Oliver departs to turn back around for Texas, we have a tender goodbye. I make dinner, we listen to George Harrison’s album “All Things Must Pass” and dance wildly on my ugly couch and orange chairs, trying to exorcise ourselves of the loss. We have taken many Polaroids throughout our five years together, and now he takes the final few. One of my head leaning on his shoulder, looks of misery on our faces as we let each other go.
Ader’s title comes from a book by P.D. Ouspensky that recounts his experiences working with the spiritual practitioner George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff’s thought hinges on the notion that we are in a state of sleep and that we can train ourselves to be more awake (conscious) through what he termed “the Work” which includes meditation, movement, and music, much of which is rooted in Sufi practice. But the Work is never done. There are not a finite number of hours in which one can achieve the state of awakeness, he says. Transcendence is not permanent, only something we are fortunate to catch glimmers of every once and a while.
JUNE 2: [PHONE] copacetic define
ellen page wife
stanley cip finals
avgolemono
[LAPTOP] delete section break
delete forward mac
safari search history on iphone
bas jan ader in search of the miraculous
google definition
we don’t have to know things anymore because we just google them
we don’t have to know things anymore we just google them new yorker
etymology of memoir
memara to vividly wonder
avoiding small talk
avoiding small talk new york times
you don’t have to know anything anymore
you don’t have to know anything anymore because of Wikipedia
vital signs
julia angwin dragnet nation search history
julia angwin dragnet nation search history chapter 12
the library of babel
art work about searching
The night before Oliver departs to turn back around for Texas, we have a tender goodbye. I make dinner, we listen to George Harrison’s album “All Things Must Pass” and dance wildly on my ugly couch and orange chairs, trying to exorcise ourselves of the loss. We have taken many Polaroids throughout our five years together, and now he takes the final few. One of my head leaning on his shoulder, looks of misery on our faces as we let each other go.
Ader’s title comes from a book by P.D. Ouspensky that recounts his experiences working with the spiritual practitioner George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff’s thought hinges on the notion that we are in a state of sleep and that we can train ourselves to be more awake (conscious) through what he termed “the Work” which includes meditation, movement, and music, much of which is rooted in Sufi practice. But the Work is never done. There are not a finite number of hours in which one can achieve the state of awakeness, he says. Transcendence is not permanent, only something we are fortunate to catch glimmers of every once and a while.
JUNE 2: [PHONE] copacetic define
ellen page wife
stanley cip finals
avgolemono
[LAPTOP] delete section break
delete forward mac
safari search history on iphone
bas jan ader in search of the miraculous
google definition
we don’t have to know things anymore because we just google them
we don’t have to know things anymore we just google them new yorker
etymology of memoir
memara to vividly wonder
avoiding small talk
avoiding small talk new york times
you don’t have to know anything anymore
you don’t have to know anything anymore because of Wikipedia
vital signs
julia angwin dragnet nation search history
julia angwin dragnet nation search history chapter 12
the library of babel
art work about searching
I want to brush up against the infinite again. The way I felt watching the eclipse, that moment was a cathedral of the infinite. Google is far from spiritual, but I think about the way a friend of mine started a photography project wandering the world and taking screenshots that she thought of as street photography. She was no longer limited by her own horizon line or geography in the search for poignant moments. She’d spend hours wandering streets in the Midwest finding a shadow of someone outside the frame stretching across an empty road, then jump to the Netherlands or Iceland where she’d turn her attention to unexpected angles created between street signs. She and I lived in Accra together, and attempting to return, she found that much of the continent of Africa was not mapped. Maybe it is more infinite because of that.
JUNE 3: [PHONE] joanna burton curator
joanna burton curator writing
rainey knudson glasstire farewell
[LAPTOP] barthes by barthes
things humans still don’t understand
JUNE 3: [PHONE] joanna burton curator
joanna burton curator writing
rainey knudson glasstire farewell
[LAPTOP] barthes by barthes
things humans still don’t understand
The pursuit of the infinite, of the miraculous, will always be a reminder of our own finitude. Even if Ader did find something miraculous, some state of miraculousness, we would never know, for how would he represent it? The miraculous will always remain just out of sight.
JUNE 4: [PHONE] indubitably
jussie parikka dust and exhaustion
[LAPTOP] johanna burton curator writing
johanna burton writing
melissa febos fine arts work center workshop
the outermost hostel provincetown
coastal acres campground provincetown ma
dunes edge campground
provincetown to boston
virginia center for the creative arts
lower manhattan cultural council
upstate new york residency
upstate new york residency festival
Melissa febos manuscript consultations
JUNE 4: [PHONE] indubitably
jussie parikka dust and exhaustion
[LAPTOP] johanna burton curator writing
johanna burton writing
melissa febos fine arts work center workshop
the outermost hostel provincetown
coastal acres campground provincetown ma
dunes edge campground
provincetown to boston
virginia center for the creative arts
lower manhattan cultural council
upstate new york residency
upstate new york residency festival
Melissa febos manuscript consultations
When I was a sophomore in college, I was given a sculpture assignment to use the same title as Bas Jan Ader for a piece of my own. It was incredibly daunting to aim so high with one work of art as a 20-year-old. A close family member was struggling with severe symptoms of newly diagnosed bipolar disorder and it seemed frivolous that I was in art school trying to make sculptures. All I wanted to do was rescue them from depressive lows and the daily struggle to get out of bed. A few days after the assignment was given, I began to wonder, if I’m not aiming for my work to be miraculous every time I make something, what am I doing except wasting other people’s time?
JUNE 5: [LAPTOP] hdh work order
JUNE 5: [LAPTOP] hdh work order
I used to Google my own name regularly to see what images and articles were somehow linked to me. What is it that I want to find in my own existence by seeing myself appear in that format, in a list of answers and a tiling of thumbnail images? Shapiro says, “It’s only when I’m traveling—away from home, away from M.—that I tend to search for myself. As if I need to keep tabs on my whereabouts. As if this is a valid way to be sure I still exist.” All searching is inescapably internal. We are concerned with the self even in our external explorations of the world. Where we travel indicates something about our internal emotions and desires, just as much as the words my fingers punch into Google indicate my internal thoughts. A search acts as a mirror.
JUNE 6: [PHONE] post office la jolla
JUNE 6: [PHONE] post office la jolla
One summer in New York, in the swamp of a Bushwick sublet with three Jewish men and an entire room dedicated to smoking pot, I started a project called Week Without Mirrors. For the duration of the piece, I refused to look in all reflective surfaces: mirrors, windows, storefronts, phones. I even avoided looking at photos in which I appeared. Jean Baudrillard writes, “As a source of light, the mirror enjoys a special place in the room. This is the basis of the ideological role it has played, everywhere in the domestic world of the well-to-do, as redundancy, superfluity, reflection: the mirror is an opulent object which affords the self-indulgent bourgeois individual the opportunity to exercise his privilege—to reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions.” How would I orient to the world differently when not looking at my own image, when not seeing my face and body reproduced and repeated everywhere superfluously?
I thought the mirrors would be the hardest part, but it turned out that all the other glass and shiny surfaces were more difficult to avoid. Unlocking my phone was dangerous. Car windows on the street, shops with floor to ceiling windows everywhere in SoHo, framed works of art behind glass that shimmered with a ghost of my outline. I avoided sitting in the middle seats of subway cars because they were in front of windows that reflected my face in the darkness of the tunnels. I had to avoid the frozen aisle of the grocery store with all the fluorescently illuminated glass doors that shuttered away microwave dinners and pints of ice cream. I’d never had much of a morning routine looking in the bathroom mirror—my straight hair rarely needed detangling with a brush—but I stopped wearing mascara to the office of a public art agency where I was interning and just hoped that my outfit looked put together enough.
At the end of the week, my sense of self was different. It had been reconfigured, pushed away from my appearance, my surfaces, my shape, the shell of my clothes. Mirrors were about giving confirmation. They reminded me, I am here. I used them to verify my presence, search for confirmation. But after that week, I understood my body as a felt sensation. I had more internal direction, didn’t need to rely on an external tool to guide me.
Did Bas Jan Ader ever look over the edge of his boat at his reflection in the Atlantic like Narcissus? Or did he just use his body to orient outward, onward?
JUNE 7:
I thought the mirrors would be the hardest part, but it turned out that all the other glass and shiny surfaces were more difficult to avoid. Unlocking my phone was dangerous. Car windows on the street, shops with floor to ceiling windows everywhere in SoHo, framed works of art behind glass that shimmered with a ghost of my outline. I avoided sitting in the middle seats of subway cars because they were in front of windows that reflected my face in the darkness of the tunnels. I had to avoid the frozen aisle of the grocery store with all the fluorescently illuminated glass doors that shuttered away microwave dinners and pints of ice cream. I’d never had much of a morning routine looking in the bathroom mirror—my straight hair rarely needed detangling with a brush—but I stopped wearing mascara to the office of a public art agency where I was interning and just hoped that my outfit looked put together enough.
At the end of the week, my sense of self was different. It had been reconfigured, pushed away from my appearance, my surfaces, my shape, the shell of my clothes. Mirrors were about giving confirmation. They reminded me, I am here. I used them to verify my presence, search for confirmation. But after that week, I understood my body as a felt sensation. I had more internal direction, didn’t need to rely on an external tool to guide me.
Did Bas Jan Ader ever look over the edge of his boat at his reflection in the Atlantic like Narcissus? Or did he just use his body to orient outward, onward?
JUNE 7:
With Google, the farther down the list of search findings you go, usually the further you get from what you were looking for. It’s rare that clicking to the twelfth page of findings reveals what you seek. The same goes for a hall of mirrors when a face that is reflected over and over and over again becomes smaller and more distant.
When you seek something internally, there might be wrong turns, but the deeper you go the closer you get to the truth. The more time passes, the more I understand Oliver’s departure.
JUNE 8: [PHONE] justine kurland son
[LAPTOP] bas jan ader in search of the miraculous
in search of the miraculous
in search of the miraculous bas jan ader
When you seek something internally, there might be wrong turns, but the deeper you go the closer you get to the truth. The more time passes, the more I understand Oliver’s departure.
JUNE 8: [PHONE] justine kurland son
[LAPTOP] bas jan ader in search of the miraculous
in search of the miraculous
in search of the miraculous bas jan ader
Baudrillard continues by saying,
|
I am seduced by the idea that mirrors simultaneously open a room and make it more intimate. I think about Eric Oglander’s project “Craigslist Mirrors,” a surreal gathering of images taken from actual Craigslist posts selling mirrors. They are propped akimbo, inevitably reflecting fragments of their sellers’ bodies or acting as portals into the various environments around them: gauzey clouds, misty mountains, a bathroom with cherry printed wallpaper. Just as light can be both a particle and a wave, his collection of images picture intimacy and expansion at the same time. I wonder what my back is to, what walls I am leaning up against, in order to open other areas, to go deeper within myself in these days. Search engines––and mirrors for that matter––don’t demand that we pose questions, they just reflect something that already exists back to us. The questions surface, nonetheless. I can scrutinize my search history, self-reflect extensively through these phrases as I unravel some understanding of the ending of my relationship. It’s curious that these lists are accumulations of things I don’t know, and yet none of them are framed as questions. They’re just lower-case words with no punctuation. People ask Google such intimate and bodily things—about their ailments, about sex, about emotional trauma. Our ignorance and fear emerges when we place the cursor in that little white box, a horizon line of curiosity.
I wonder, did Bas Jan Ader see land—closed, solid, certain—right before he died, or was the horizon line all fluid, infinite ocean?
I wonder, did Bas Jan Ader see land—closed, solid, certain—right before he died, or was the horizon line all fluid, infinite ocean?
to kaleidoscope: reflections and refractions // that collide and entangle // contained illumination
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Ayden LeRoux (she/her) is an artist and writer from New England. Her writing has been published in Guernica, Lit Hub, Catapult, Electric Lit, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cosmonauts Avenue, Palimpsest, and edibleManhattan among others. She is the co-author of Odyssey Works (Princeton Architectural Press), a book about centering empathy in art practice written with long-time collaborator Abraham Burickson. She is working on her next book, Notes on Breathlessness, about asthma, queer eroticism, and art that leaves us breathless.
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Ayden LeRoux (she/her) is an artist and writer from New England. Her writing has been published in Guernica, Lit Hub, Catapult, Electric Lit, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cosmonauts Avenue, Palimpsest, and edibleManhattan among others. She is the co-author of Odyssey Works (Princeton Architectural Press), a book about centering empathy in art practice written with long-time collaborator Abraham Burickson. She is working on her next book, Notes on Breathlessness, about asthma, queer eroticism, and art that leaves us breathless.