I sometimes hold my tortoiseshell cat Myrtle up to a mirror and say, “Lacanian moment.” We started this long ago, when while passing a mirror, cradling the cat like a baby, I noticed her looking, green eyes wide, as if she recognized herself. Myrtle, according to the rescue we adopted her from back in 2015, is now ten-ish years old. Long past kittenhood, yet her reflection always seems to surprise, or at least interest, her.
When I worked at a bookstore in the former school building that is now a mall + offices + apartments, I’d stop by an antique store across the hall to browse the odds and ends. Retro postcards, vintage tins, costume jewelry, table linens, scarves, embroidered handkerchiefs, milk glass pitchers. Some objects were useful, others were decorative artifacts. Their currency: beauty, strangeness, obsolescence.
On one visit, I bought four small frames. The box where I found them didn’t specify their composition or purpose, just something like “Frames” and the price. They were $.50 or $1 each. I liked that they looked like glassless Regency mirrors. For a long while I kept them in a metal tin. Eventually, decorating my office during a snowstorm, I felt inspired to put them up. I hammered four nails into the wall and carefully balanced a frame on each. Once they were hung, I saw them less as mirrors.
The frames are flexible; they’ll hold their shape if I bend them. When I look them up, I learn they’re actually daguerrotype mats. Their past function was to frame an image and offer space between the daguerrotype plate and the glass cover.
While writing, I’ll sometimes zero in on one and imagine a face: someone no longer on this plane, someone living, sometimes a stranger.
I’m thinking of how writing—art—is sometimes described as a mirror and I think that can be true. For me, it’s also a portal, a doorway. I find these openings in reading as much as I do in writing. How many times have I described a book as “a portal” to customers—even if it’s not a speculative novel? How many times has a revision felt like stepping through or surfacing?
Each blank frame can be a portal or a void. An invitation or an absence. Or are they predictive? If I look long enough, will the future reveal itself? (Of course not. But maybe? Let’s ask a feline expert.)
Exercises for Empty Frames
Fantastic for refreshing your writing space and doing some writing.
Source and hang your frame.
I recommend thrifting the mat/frame from your favorite local trove for vintage treasures. Keep your intentions in mind when you decide on location. Do you want the frame within view of where you write? Or would you prefer to hang it in a place that asks you to distance from the desk and untether from your usual work? Mine are hung so I just have to glance up and there they are.
Try one of the following writing approaches:
Get Epistolary
Compose a letter. Are you writing to someone specific, as the speaker does in Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s? Or are you addressing a group of people? Is who you’re writing to real or imagined? Alive or no longer of this world? You may also write to yourself—in the past or future. Maybe you’ll take the exercise a step further and switch up the point of view once you have a draft.
Address the Void
Write toward absence. What is missing in your life? What have you lost? (Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” may inspire you here.) What are you looking for and how might you find it? I’m saying “you,” but this could just as easily translate to a fictional character or the speaker of an essay.
Fill the Blank Space
Fill the frame, envision something in the blank space. This can be an object or a landscape. Describe what you put there. If it helps, draw it on a sticky note—you can write it instead if you, like me, possess minimal drawing skills—and put the note in the frame. There’s your assignment for the day.
The parts of the wall that the frames occupy feel less empty to me than a blank page. The emptiness is contained, impermanent. The frame borders offer parameters/perimeters, sure. But the boundaries can dissolve or blur. And empty frames make tunnels into which you can imagine, remember, or dream.
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