Mirror, Mirror on Page

26th June 

Literature is a picture, I mean it’s sort of a picture and mirror. It’s the expression of passion, it’s subtle criticism, it’s edifying instruction and it’s a document.

29th July
I read both your letters and was astonished. All I can say, my friend, is that either you’re refusing to reveal something to me and have mentioned only part of all the unpleasant things that have happened to you or else... Really, Makar Alekseyevich, your letters give the impression that you are in some way disturbed...

―“Poor Folk” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1846

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Dear Alex,

Mirrors are a place of secrecy. They don’t tell you much. They don’t show your true image as others see you, inverting your symmetry. They listen only to your telling them what you want to see.

Maybe that’s why we get jittery around cameras which seem to seize us more often at the wrong slant or glare. On page, the flash of truth looks more searing.

I am reviewing a few of your one- or two-liners written earlier this year, accessorizing and tailoring them, daring you to return to the morgue of bygone blogs in need of a New Year revival.

As we lay claim on everything - our vanity, our vaccine - we lay ourselves wide open to being claimed by anything.

Have you ever considered our “doing good” for the benefit of others in this pandemic can actually mean a disruption to key conversations about being human? Many lost jobs, loved ones, stripped to the last fray of hope. Let them speak to our lives.

No exaggeration: the moment I read it, I was a changed man, freed again. Words with power, speak death to despair, breaking in hope.

Seeing them reformed, do your own words foaming from heart droop a bit oddly in air ventilated through time and virus, an inversion of familiarity? In the mirror, the gangly things encroaching you look suspicious, their geometry perverted, luster oxidizing, stunted securities. The beauty of dust rests on its reflecting of light and color in space, on mirror and you.

My mind is wandering off focus again, recalling a few phrases that follow me daily as dust, lines that have saved me from many mini deaths in this passing year, language to hoist me through these final 2 days over a new threshold in anticipation.

Yours, Kate