If that's not true, it should be

 

Due to their nature fragments get scattered. Mine here have long been both scattered and forgotten. But on occasion the fragments come back, or there's a gaze that looks back, conjuring them into the present through the past – a case of imagology or the phenomenon of cached images. But then we can say that about any image we happen to look at...

Take the image above. It was taken on the night of June 7, 2024 in my bathroom, while I was getting ready to go bed. As I couldn't fall asleep, I played with the filters on my phone. I applied a simple combination to the self-portrait, and then posted it on my social media, Instagram first and then Facebook via automatic share. The image had the following caption:

2:45AM on the way to bed, glasses off and disheveled hair, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, and you wonder who that person is. Hag comes to mind first, but then you also consider the possibility of a movie star in a 60s Italian film. You don’t want to say, Wong Kar Wai, because you don’t want to insult the sublime Hong Kong director.

Then one of my cartomancy students commented: 'the Empress reflects back, and she already knows tomorrow’s mystery and does not give it a second thought because she operates out of the time continuum! If that’s not true, it should be.'

Somehow this comment made me look back at the fragments here that reference the continuum that I'm forever in love with, the mathematical kind, that is, unless, of course, there may be another kind too.

I was furthermore amused by what spark of the imagination this impromptu image suggested in others: 'Fellini,' someone said, 'Wong Kar Wai's Fallen Angels, another proposed. And yet another was even more elaborate: 'I am sure with the right music and light filters, Wong Kar Wai would have this as part of a scene that would demonstrate poetry in motion.'

I was tempted to fall for all of it, but as they say, what is the function of any act of identification, except to stir the fictions of our trivial emotions? Thinking of it in these terms, I'm now tempted to do a whole series of filtered images in the mirror and call it Insomnia, when I remember: I don't write on Fragments anymore... except for the time when someone says, 'if that's not true, it should be,' pointing to how the continuum works – with us in it or outside of it – yet always in mysterious ways, or the ways of bathroom lights at 2:45 in the morning.