On Witnessing

The week before all my roommates left, my bike slipped over a patch of black ice (in shadow, thus unforeseen) and I collapsed into a pile of wheels and limbs. It wasn’t too bad at the time, but afterwards my knees bloomed into a terrible palate of blue, green, and purple, the colors remaining on my skin for weeks later. As if to say, look at my pain. I alone, looked.

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes “we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Having your own reflection for company is bearable until you think about how other people have other people for company. At least with the mirror I see only myself, which is familiar; everywhere else expresses a lacking.

She asks, “Can a reflection be a witness?”

During a long walk, I snap off a pale flower blossom from a lush, dew-stricken tree. I snap it off, knowing that it would die, but wanting it regardless. At my house, I place the flower into a coffee mug filled with water and then watch the petals wither over several hours.

*

What does it mean to be witness to your own solitude? It means that you alone are jury, judge, and convict. You pick flowers not to possess them, but to hold them. It is the uneasy line between ownership and innocuous perception. How else would you know that it has happened, the flowering?

*

In 1965, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama stirred a frenzy with the release of her first Infinity Mirror exhibition. In this room, a complex combination of mirrors and opaque objects was layered on the walls, ground, and roof such that visitors found themselves standing in seemingly infinite space. Around them, a kaleidoscopic fracturing. 

She has since gone on to create over twenty of these exhibitions, filling the room with paint splashes, lanterns, light, and amorphous shapes of nothing in particular though perhaps best described as “flower-like.” Her exhibitions have captivated audiences, with an illusion that ventures new territory; the floors go on forever until the room seems to discover its own blurry horizon. The visitor assumes the role of subject within this art exhibition—in infinite space, they stand alone as observer and observed. Yet it would be mistaken to consider this a brand of narcissistic art, for in a room full of mirrors, one is not just reflected but obliterated.

*

There is the experience and the memory of the experience, and then there is the writing of the memory of the experience. Each time, the line between reality and imagined grows fainter. Does this difference matter? The human eye has invented the color magenta by constructing a space between blue and red in order to perceive a wavelength of light that does not exist. But can you look at magenta and tell me that it does not exist?

If some aspects of my memory are false witnesses, I’m not sure I can call them inauthentic. They color the space.

*

You could say that I am concerned with coloring. I am concerned with the business of documentation, disturbed that no medium is good enough, that even my flowers will invariably wither. We admit that writing (memory) will forever be an imprecise recapturing. And even though film is the only medium that traps the exact light particles that we see, it is equally imperfect as a form. What photographs choose to portray is equally important as what they choose to exclude. So how does one portray exclusion? Departure? Absence?

Defined by what we cannot see, shadows contain their own strange attraction. In some ways, it has been far easier for me to record this absence.

*

Photograph: Bikes and shadows. Bikes, or shadows. Shadows of bikes, and me, on the bike. Me, my shadow; shadows, on the bike. Against the city skyline, the brick of street, the reflection of water, the staccato of mesh fence.

Photograph: Before they left, I made goodbye portraits of my friends. Through the lens, it was like a dream. I don’t think we thought of it as goodbye at the time.

*

In the early months of the pandemic, solitude bloomed behind our backs in quiet increments, until, stunned one morning, we realized that its dusky leaves had been all we’d seen for days. There is something unrelenting about an empty house at twilight—by this I mean, I miss breathing together.

Seeking solace, I have been going on long bike rides when the afternoons grow drowsy on sunlight. To get to the bike path you have to pedal through a stretch of tunnel, over a bridge, and then up a steep hill. Afterwards, it’s smooth sailing. Just miles of black tar and the weight of salt in the air. The path runs alongside abandoned train tracks for a few miles, and you can tell they were never laid properly because of the wood decay and wild grass invading the spaces between planks. They were tracks that had grown into themselves.

My friend and I meet halfway between Riverside and Providence. We watch the sun pool into the water. We are six feet apart, fingers inches if we reach out, but we don’t.

*

How much must you know someone, and I mean really know them, before you can let them braid your hair? And how soon is it before we ought to share drink, sleep, poems? 

There are people who we would let touch our hair but not our poems. There are people who we would let touch our poems but not our hair.

*

Have you ever held a piece of obsidian in your palms? Staring into obsidian is like sinking into black milk. It is utterly indecipherable. It is one of the earliest incarnations of natural glass, and forms when highly viscous lava cools into a brittle, shiny, fractured material. The Ancient Mayans valued obsidian more than gold and would fashion it into mirrors to predict the future. All of this suggests that humans have found meaning in reflections for a long time.

I am holding it in my palms, and I think I understand now. The power of ritual is the same as that of prophecy—both lie in the sharing of it, the worship of it. Understand that glass is neither a liquid nor a solid but a property in between. It flows, slowly. But it would take longer than since the universe was born to melt. Longer than since we thought we invented glass. This is not to say that what hasn’t happened won’t still happen. Here is a prophecy: one day all mirrors will be pools, and we alone at the precipice, reflected.

*

From behind glass I watch the trees move and rustle their naked branches. A dreadful rain, the night previous, had occurred. When in the morning I stand with trees in a space usually populated by people, and observe the vast vacancy, I think of noise—the kind of noise found in forests before a storm, of clouds lugged by their own shadows, of absence. And of a world once sundered by bodies and hair, now buoyant. I’m talking about how you can often tell when you’re not alone—something about the air.

What does it mean for witnessing to generate its own disturbance? In other words, does my proximity to you beatify, or ruin?

In the evening, I try to climb to the top of the roof but have to leave and not disturb the people already there. I don’t think they see me. I am not thinking about the quarantine when I leave. I am thinking about moments, and how easily they can be ruined. I go home and write, “Only a few weeks ago I had been suffering from loneliness but not aloneness. Now I suffer from aloneness… the loneliness comes and goes.”

Like loneliness is something that moves into my body. A tourist, even.

There are places that necessitate disturbance—those places not whole until seen. My family visited Disneyworld once, years ago. At Cinderella’s castle, I took picture after picture, waiting for the perfect shot, which meant, to me, a lack of people. Just the frost-blue tipped castle, pristine, alone. Given that my family was visiting during the afternoon at the busiest time of year, my efforts proved fruitless. Eventually my father erupted: “Disney isn’t Disney without the people!”

He was right, of course. Pristine was beautiful but so were people. Eventually, my photography grew attached to the backs of strangers.

*

Lacking bodies, I look to sunlight to fill my frame. Sunlight, splintering in heavy dusk—the light gleams off the smooth beams of (someone else’s) bike in the corner. Sunlight, a bruise in the sky, demands witnessing. Sunlight. Each new sunset is colored by a previous sunset of my memory. This doesn’t make the experience of the sunset worse. Only familiar.

*

Supposedly, all the faces you see in your dreams belong to people you’ve encountered before. People walking their dogs, or at the mall. People waiting for taxis, or in the rain. We know over a hundred thousand faces and remember less than 10 percent of our dreams. This is another way to say that in dreams of a hundred thousand people, we are known, too.

Reincarnation is another proposed explanation for dreams. That you experienced all this before, and now fragments resurface when you sleep. But I dreamed I drowned once, swirling in a tunnel, and I woke up breaking on an excess of air. I dreamed I flew once, too. I was light as air, lighter.

What does it mean to be witness to your own dreams? Or if you have been dreaming vividly, and forgetting immediately. In the morning, you reach out for escaping, volatile threads. They are dream threads, already gone. It is impossible to retrieve them honestly.

*

In the morning I stare at my face for long minutes, noting changes in the landscape, convinced that I have aged. The caverns of my under-eye, the mountainous curves around my mouth, darker? All these changes might be imaginary, and in fact nothing has changed.

In a room full of mirrors and none other, what do the mirrors reflect? If reflection is a process of observation, and there is no one to observe, then nothing must be reflected. In a room full of mirrors and none other, there would be no light. 

So add a light—now what?

*

Photograph: The cherry blossoms bloom and rain down within a week. Immortalized during the tail end of their vitality against a grey sky, who would have thought they would ever die? (Who would have known they ever lived?)

Photograph: A tangle of hair, in the sink. I cut it gradually over weeks, delighting in the ritual.

Photograph: Silence is a type of noise too. It is windless, clear like air.

*

What if every memory we’ve ever had is stored in some deep recess of our brain, amongst some lost bramble of neurons? Even the ones we’ve forgotten. Less of a memory, more of an imprint, directing unconscious habits such as chewing the straw before drinking. Or, when faced with a natural disaster, run. Our body acting as watcher even though we might forget.

One of the strange dreams might have involved a cyclone, swirling with water, wind, and rage until the cyclone swallowed the dark sky and exploded; it wasn’t an explosion of destruction but creation, the Big Bang. Well, I didn’t run, I recorded the whole thing on my dream-phone, and this was the only dream that I remembered. Maybe the point is to spend your life chasing after a series of images that haunt you, and in the process you discover their genesis.

*

I noticed a pure orange light on a neighboring house the other day, and rushed outside to capture the light on film before the sun set. It looked as if heat were a color. If heat were butter, and dripped. Most likely it won’t appear on camera—there is nothing like that light. 

Perhaps the point is never to catch the light, because you cannot. The point is not to possess memory either, not in the sense that it is relived alone. I send you my photos so you can remember with me. You understand, after all, that when the sky is a dark, unsettled indigo, the only thing that could honor your worship of the sky is if you had someone whose sleeve you could tug on and then say, “Hey, look at the sky!” Even if they’re already looking.

CZ Zeng is a recent graduate from Brown University, where she studied applied math and history. She is interested in writing about the lyrical and the weird. She currently lives in Toronto. This is her first publication.