On "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "22, a Million": Immersions in Obscurity and Expansiveness

By Neha Mulay

When incoherence reigns, obscurity beckons. In an age of spectacle, tumult, isolation, and despair, as the outward swirls in chaos, some days, the mind cannot help but circumvent understanding and turn towards the experiential.

In 2020, the spectacle of politics exacerbated by the pandemic compelled me to seek artistic mediums that transcended not only thought, but language itself. While political events pushed me towards further active engagement and an increased awareness of systemic injustices, prompted by isolation, I also leaned towards philosophical inquiry and introspection. Many, including myself, underwent a shift, a recalibration in our quest from the exterior towards the interior. 

In many ways, the realities of the wreckage were all around me. Disruptions to school, work, and life were pervasive and tangible. Conversely, as almost everything shifted towards the technological realm, and as I spent oodles of time on my computer, I felt the physicality of life begin to slip through my fingers. Mired in the technological realm, confined by the parameters of quarantine, and shackled by the specific devastation of the world around me, I began grasping for freedom.

It occurred to me that where cultural wars and symbols prevail, where the Baudrillardian simulacrum is its own self-contained sphere that automatically regenerates and fuels itself, a poetics of obscurity compels not as balm but a transcendence of the self. 

Ashbery’s poetry has always beckoned for its operation as an experiential transmission, brimming with wry absurdities; poems that asked essential questions and summoned only glimpses of fragile answers. Questioning had brought me no resolutions and I wondered endlessly about the chaos of the world and the stagnancy of my own mind. I found myself returning to Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, driven not only by a relentless philosophical pursuit but also by a need for cognitive boundlessness. 

The very first line of the collection, from the poem “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat,” points to this search, to a grasping that extends beyond the vehicular bodily form and the restrictive patterns of a tenacious mind:

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free  

The experiential abstractions of this line resonated with me, compelling me to interrogate the nature of the quest, the restlessness of an age bound up in its own carnage and replications. Confined as I was spatially, I reflected upon the nature of perception itself. I had my own lens, my own way of looking at the world, and I began to question the boundaries of said lens and the possibilities of a lens-less comprehension. 

Such an examination is not without revival and loss, a pattern apparent in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat.” At times, the poem submerges itself into the pulse of life, other times, it emerges to question and subsequently fragment itself: 

A look of glass stops you  

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?  

Did they notice me, this time as I am,  

Or is it postponed again?

As perception fails, meaning never arrives. “You” have been saturating in language and construction, but nothing has endured. When thought fails, as it often does, elasticity becomes the norm, so the formless is inhabited.

Further on in the poem:

The prevalence of those grey flakes falling?  

They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun

Longer than the sphinx and are none the wiser for it. 

The sphinx here functions as the ultimate symbol, representative of both relic and promise, the god of sun: divinity turned to stone, the shape of myth on the horizon dictating a dream. The reflection upon the nature of the “you,” and the subsequent stagnation of conclusion turns the self into a relic in a museum, which gives it a mythological power reined in the past.

When the world is symbol and symbol collapses, where is the nexus of meaning?

A portrait of the self is innately a gesture towards its undoing. Ashbery shovels the peculiar roots of being until their atrophy. His poems play with clay, mold air and gesture towards removal, calling forth a disoriented expansiveness within the reader. 

Searching for an auditory echo of undoing, questioning, and expansiveness, I arrived at Bon Iver’s 22, A Million. By far his most bizarre album, Pitchfork’s Amanda Petrusich insightfully points out that the quest of the album is an existential one, a ceaseless questioning, creation of and movement away from bare-boned emotion and towards the disintegration of sound through technologically induced fractal sound. 

While the album was released in 2016, it summons a disintegrated disillusionment that feels uniquely reminiscent of 2020. A significant departure from his earlier work, the album evokes the jarred units of being and consequently reaches beyond the self. This is apparent in the song 22 (OVER S∞∞N):

There I find you marked in constellation (two, two)  

There isn't ceiling in our garden  

And then I draw an ear on you  

So I can speak into the silence

The mouthpiece of song and speech by its very nature disintegrates. The garden doesn’t have a ceiling, prompting the tattered voice to reach towards the vapid ear of oblivion. Here, the collapse of communication turns into a portal towards boundlessness.

At the cliff face of meaning and engagement, what is the alternative to being? Ashbery’s work asks the same question, albeit with more wit and a self-conscious cognizance of its own absurdity, in the poem “Worsening Situation”:

Everyone is along for the ride,  

It seems. Besides, what else is there?  

The annual games? True, there are occasions  

For white uniforms and a special language  

kept secret from the others. The limes 

are duly sliced. I know all this  

But can’t seem to keep it from affecting me

Here, Ashbery blends the interior and the exterior. Occasions arise and are locked away. The limes, perhaps symbolic of a violent destiny or the breaking open of illusion, have an inevitability to them. Yet, the persona pursues detachment; of course, in the grand scheme, the game and the continuation are the only constants and attempts are absurdly futile, a point illustrated by the last few lines of the poem: 

Starched white collars, wondering whether there’s a way  

To get them really white again. My wife  

Thinks I’m in Oslo—Oslo, France that is.

The mundane, quotidian mention of the collars and the ambiguous absurdity of the location points to dissolution of both the meaning and the pursuit. Furthermore, failure is a key operational concept here, similarly apparent in Bon Iver’s anguished ineptitude at a marked lack of arrival and resolution:

This is apparent in “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄”:

I'm unorphaned in our northern lights  

Dedicoding every daemon  

Taken in the tall grass of the mountain cable 

And I cannot seem to find I'm able

Indecipherable symbol is a strong function here. Ashbery’s poetics often engage in a caricature of symbol, pointing to the gap between the signifier and the signified:

The night has taken over. 

A moon of Cistercian pallor 

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed

Robert Mueller purports that Ashbery is constructing a poetics of consciousness, one that exists in the sphere of experiences, emotions, and observations as they arise. The collection is concerned less with the nature of the portrait of the self and more with the fallacy of engaging in the construction. Anita Sokolsky asserts that Ashbery’s work is often a critique of the self that consciously moves away from “narcissistic” indulgence and “solipsism.” This is apparent in the poem “Forties Flick”:

Things too real

To be of much concern, hence artificial, yet now all over the page,

The indoors with the outside becoming part of you

As you find you never left off laughing at death,

The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch 

The nexus of his is not the intangible self, rather, it is the creation of space through self-conscious examination of the trivial concerns that preoccupy the mind. Once the fragility of the self is envisioned, boundaries between the internal and external dissolve. Erasure, when it arrives, is respite and amalgamation—there is a liberatory aspect to it, a certain lightness and expansiveness; this is apparent in ”As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat” : 

The great formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,

Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade

That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,

Still lightly, but with wise authority and tact

What is being but an affair of the elements? I was struck by this question as I read these lines. As a writer, I try to capture experience, but it mostly hovers beyond my grasp. Ashbery’s work is obscure and ambiguous not as a function but rather as pure, indecipherable rendition. 

Similarly, 22, a Million, by virtue of its deconstructed servings of anguish, points to not the stars of ache but rather, the spaces in between:

I’ve been to that grove

Where no matter the source is

And I walked it off, how long I’d last

Sore-ring to cope, whole band on the canyon

(When the days have no numbers)

In a search for the source, the self disseminates into the environment. The grove and the canyon become extensions of oneself and numbers lose meaning. 

Creating a transmission of the experiential and deliberately circumventing meaning implies an inherent cynicism with the aforementioned perception. When we as readers and listeners are unable to grasp tangible meaning, we may enter into the respite of the inexpressible. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and 22, a Million are as much about inquiry as they are about failure—the failure of expression, revival, and linear progression.

Once the philosophical quest begins, it leads to quandary; the disintegration of the self is liberatory—if disorienting—but even when transcendence is achieved, physicality and the self continue to prevail. I cannot say the pursuit has an end, nor can I claim these works facilitated resolution. Rather, as chaos swirled around me and I, like many others, could no longer comprehend or accept reality, there was comfort in the suspension of meaning and an immersion in obscurity and experience in its pure form. 

In the throes of the maniacal year of 2020, I sought freedom, I longed for transcendence. Immersing myself in the work of Ashbery and Bon Iver, I learned that the quest itself was a kind of resolution. As I let go of the notion of arrival, momentarily, I was boundless.