Mirrors and a Hat: unbearable lightness of being

My last post was several months ago and also featured mirrors. I have collected an assortment of mirrors along the way. There is something about the dispersion of light and intimate view of the material world–the metaphors around reflections. Since the author Milan Kundera recently passed away, I watched again the popular late 1980s movie based on his novel. Despite the wonderful cast, Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche, it turns out that major players are also the mirrors and a bowler hat.

The lightness of being in part is an analogy of life as an outline, a sketchy version of what could be without second chances to re-do or correct. Young Terez complains about her provincial town “It’s so boring. Nobody here reads. Nobody here discusses anything.” Fortunately, she has the sense to move to Prague where she found more than just readers and discussions.

Milan Kundera has been quoted as saying this:

Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Even though it seems that everything has already been said and done, I think there is still room for new perspectives. I hear so many complaints lately about our damaged ability to focus on reading, possibly due to information overload and the tendency to scan rather than comprehend.

So … if nobody reads, why write a book or publish one? Nonetheless, I did that. The 92-page, 26-image softcover book is available for $14.23 from Bookemon Creative Author Press.

The central feature of my title is a mirror. I seem to live among a wilderness of mirrors.

My book features a photo of a mirror from 1992. This weathered mirror remains with me…

The bowler hat from the Unbearable Lightness movie is what we all remember. I had a similar hat back then…

One of the stories in my book also features a hat, a different hat.

I recently listened to an interview with author Tim Kreider on The Unspeakable podcast. A popular quote of his was mentioned because it has been used frequently as a meme:

The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known

That sums up my current point of view about releasing a memoir about myself into the wide world of readers. Yet, there can never be too many stories about the lives of women. In the spirit of Nora Ephron:

Slip on a banana peel, people laugh.

Tell a story about it, you are a hero.

Creating the book, completing it, and self-publishing has been a process. More on that later.

One more item about mirrors, a poem by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

~~~~~~~~~~

COPYRIGHT PAT PENDLETON 2023–ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Find out more at patpendletonstudio.com / timraymondstudio.com