AN OBJECT OF WONDER
Donca Vianu
My object of wonder, right across my bed, on the opposite wall, is the most quiet, serene object on the planet.
It comes in many shapes and sizes, all equally unperturbed.
Mine is flat and rectangular, measuring 180×70 cm. (I see myself in it, sitting in bed, propped by cushions, writing.)
There are smaller ones which, mounted on strategic places in a car, keep the traffic safe; girls carry them tucked in their handbags; tiny, they help the dentist to extract the right tooth.
Others, huge, travel through space and time, between stars and galaxies and bridges of light expanded over thousands of light years.
They reveal, under the peaceful static beauty we admire in the night sky, violent cosmic events: density waves looking innocently like spiral arms of a galaxy, compressing forcefully clouds of gas into new stars to be born; a gigantic galaxy’s voracious feeding on clusters of stars in its vicinity; titanic supernovae explosions; fierce winds of energetic particles; a web of dark matter accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
But here on Earth, on 39 latitude and 07 longitude, where I am, everything is quiet and peaceful, the clock shows midday, the sun floods the room.
I take a break, go out on the balcony, stand in the shade of the high, four hundred years old olive tree and gaze at the garden below. Butterflies flutter around the lavender plants, and the sunflowers have turned their heads towards south. A cuckoo is calling ‘coo-coo, coo-coo, coo-coo’….
And back to bed and writing.
The thought strikes me that during my short absence the image in the mirror was of the empty bed.
The images change, the mirror stays the same. Unassuming, stainless.
Its invention and perfection took three thousand years. The Phoenicians, master sailors of the Mediterranean Sea, inventors of the alphabet, discovered the manufacture of glass. The Venetians, two and a half thousand years later, made from glass mirrors.
Can I go through the mirror, to the other side? My cat tries it, moves its forepaw to the right and to the left of the mirror’s sides, in uttermost bewilderment and confusion, to no avail.
But I manage.
Not the landscape of fairies, rushing rabbits and cat smiles opens up to me on the other side. No, what I encounter is something altogether different: a not substantial equivalent of the mirror I passed through.
And this is what I find, which my cat, for all its curiosity, could not: the mirror on the other side is not made of glass, and has no frame, and has no wall to hang on. It has no size I can measure. It holds more than any bedroom could contain — more, even, than the Hubble mirror traveling through the dark between galaxies. Because what it holds is not images of things.
What I find is the mirror of my mind. My entire life, each and every thought, perception, event is inscribed onto it. Yet it itself is undisturbed. As the mirror on the wall in my sleeping room, as the mirror in the Hubble telescope traveling millions of light years away, it is unperturbed, unstained. What I encounter is Awareness, this time turned towards my mind, but extending into infinity. The Awareness which only mirrors, does not participate, only registers, only witnesses.
“These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples,
The great globe itself, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made of;
And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1
We are all spirits. Eventually the Universe and we as well will die, only the Mirror of the Cosmic Mind will stay.