Driving away from Merida down Highway 261 one becomes aware of the
indifferent horizon. Looking down on the map (it was all there), a
tangled network of horizon lines on paper called "roads", some red,
some black. Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, Chiapas and
Guatemala congealed into a mass of gaps, points, and little blue
threads (called rivers). The map legend contained signs in a neat row:
archaeological sites (black), bathing resort (blue), arts and crafts
(green), aguatic s****ts (blue) national park (green), service station
(yellow). On the map of Mexico they were scattered like the droppings
of some small animal.
In the suburb of Uxmal, which is to say nowhere, what appeared to be a
a shallow quarry was dug into the ground to a depth of about four or
five feet, exposing a bright red clay mixed with white limestone
fragments. Near a small cliff twelve mirrors were stuck into clods of
earth. On this same site, the Great Ice Cap of Gondwanaland was
constructed according to a map outline on page 459 of Marshall Kay's
and Edwin H. Colbert's "Stratigraphy and Life History". It was an
"earthmap" made of white limestone.
A bit of the Carboniferous period is now installed in Uxmal. That
great age of calcium carbonite seemed a fitting offering for a land so
rich in limestone. Reconstructing a land mass that existed 350 to 305
million years ago on a terrain once controlled by sundry Mayan gods
caused a collision in time that left one with a sense of timelessness.
Timelessness is found in the lapsed moments of perception, in the
common pauses that breaks apart into a sandstorm of pauses. The malady
of wanting to make is "unmade", and the malady of wanting to be "able"
is disabled. Gondwanaland is a kind of memory, it is but an incognito
land mass that has been *unthought* about and turned into a Map of
Impasse. You cannot visit Gondwanaland, but you can visit a "map" of
it.
South of Campeche, on the way to Champoton, mirrors were set on the
beach of the Gulf of Mexico. Jade colored water splashed near the
mirrors, which were sup****ted by dry seaweed and eroded rocks, but the
reflections abolished the sup****ts and now words abolish the
reflections. The unnameable tonalities of blue that were once square
tide pools of sky have vanished into the camera, and now rest in the
cemetery of the printed page - Ancora in Arcadia morte. A sense of
arrested breakdown prevails over the level mirror surfaces and the
unlevel ground. "The true fiction eradicates the false reality" said
the voiceless voice of Chalchihiuticue - the Surd of the Sea.
The mirror displacement cannot be expressed in rational dimensions.
The distances between the twelve mirrors are shadowed disconnections,
where measure is dropped and incomputable. (See Duchamp's Three
Standard Stoppages). Who can divulge from what part of the sky the
blue came" Who can say how long the color lasted? Must "blue" mean
something? Why do the mirrors display a conspiracy of muteness
concerning their very existence? When does a displacement become a
misplacement? These are forbidding questions that place comprehension
in a predicament. The questions the mirrors ask always fall short of
answers. Mirrors thrive on surds, and generate incapacity. Reflections
fall onto the mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every
rational assertion. Inexpressible limits are on the other side of the
incidents, and they will never be grasped.
The Fifth Mirror Displacement: At Palenque the lush jungle
begins...Writing about mirrors brings one into a groundless jungle
where words buzz incessantly instead of insects. Here in the heat of
reason (nobody knows what that is), one tends to rememer and think in
lumps...In the jungle all light is paralyzed. Particles of color
infected the molten reflections on the twelve mirrors, and in so
doing, engendered mixtures of darkness and light. Color as an agent of
matter filled the reflected illuminations with shadowy tones, pressing
the light into dusty material opacity. Flames of light were imprisoned
in a jumbled spectrum of greens. Refracted sparks of sun****ne seemed
smothered under the weight of clouded mixtures - yellow, green, blue,
indigo and violet.
excerpts from Robert Smithson's "Incidents of Mirror Travel in the
Yucatan"
"To record the distance between the object and myself, and the
distances of the object itself (its exterior distances, i.e. its
measurements), and the distances of objects among themselves, and to
insist further on the fact that these are only distances (and not
divisions), this comes down to establi****ng that things are here and
that they are nothing but things, each limited to itself.... "
Alain Robbe-Grillet
(August 18, 1922 - Feb. 18, 2008)
|
