Note:
Agnoiology: Pronunciation (ag-noi-OL-uh-jee) The study of ignorance or the investigation of the unknowable.
Reliquary: Pronunciation (re-lə-ˌkwer-ē) A container or shrine in which sacred relics are kept.
Silvered dark: A deliberately paradoxical phrase.
Silvering is the metallic backing that turns plain glass into a mirror; without it, there is only darkness. Yet the same silvering that grants the mirror its power to show also distorts and fragments whatever it reflects.
Only fragments of the past escape our grip, slip between our fingers into a small, unmarked reliquary to find refuge. All the rest sinks beneath the dark water of forgetting. What we glimpse inside the box when we revisit it is a severely distorted reflection from the curved or irregular plane of the walls, drowned in the hush of cathedral glass and the treachery of mirrors.
What welcomes us is never a faithful image but a warped reflection from the mirror, bending and betraying perception, a moon swollen to fill the sky. A concave surface, curved inward like the inside of a spoon, pulls things unnaturally close, magnifying them until they loom larger than life—or turn upside down, depending on how close we stand. A convex surface, resembling the back of a spoon, pushes everything away, shrinking its subjects into faint silhouettes that seem distant, detached, yet more expansive in scope. Other mirrors, commonly seen in carnivals, create twisted and pulsating effects, varying degrees or types of distortion, such as stretching, squishing, or bending in unpredictable ways. These disorient the mind, making it difficult to understand what was once tangible and experiential to all senses.
It is with remembrance, too: what we reconstruct is not truth but a theater of distortion, a performance of imagination dressed as certainty. The story we clutch is never the one we lived—only a mirage polished by time’s funhouse, a private constellation forever bending in the silvered dark.
Memory is a reflection from a shiny surface, recalling which is rarely perfect. It is garbled, blurred, or twisted by time, desire, the unevenness of the surface, and perception. What we store in our keepsake box is not an exact replica of the past, but refracted impressions, pale images—a record of the fragile continuity of time, shaped by loss and longing.
In Part 2, we’ll explore how this understanding of memory’s distortions shapes our present encounters and our search for meaning among the fragments.