Robert Smithson: Mirror Displacements
in the Yucatan

When you cut the sun, you cut the sky, and then it can be moved in its smaller pieces; it's moving now because we are speaking, the sky behind our voices, the sky angled to take no notice, the sky feigning, feinting; he took a very sharp knife and, entirely freehand, cut the sky perfectly in half.     Mirror-shift through broken light       the sky, by definition, is never


seen entire          and travels right along with us in a herd of fragments. 1969:   Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Virginia Dwan made a trip through the Yucatan          in the course of which             at nine locations Smithson placed twelve        foot-square mirrors             at various angles in various materials, disrupting everything around them.


First displacement:        on the other side of the horizon between Uman and Muna: in a region      where the land is routinely        cleared by burning and in the surrounding ash       mirrors embedded in the charred history that we cannot see          in the photograph     among the burnt stumps retreating back into the forest.


And in the mirrors: trees in splices.          A mirror always demands that you look more closely.     The trees will not stop.      It is morning, and there is light all over the ground, white as salt.                Smithson took the title of his essay "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" from John L. Stephens' 1843 book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. Stephens, an American writer, traveled extensively in the Yucatan from 1839 to 1842          with the English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood.


Stephens claimed to have been shocked by the Mayans' lack of interest in their ancient artworks.      Many of the artifacts that Stephens and Catherwood collected ended up in the American Museum of Natural History, where Robert Smithson first encountered them.        And makes the mirrors suture these various eras, which is the nature of a mirror—to never stop traveling backward.


The white salt           is a halt in the sun             the sun that far south in its granular ire.     They were traveling in a car     with a travelers' guide open on the seat beside them       open to a map               and on the map in  capital  letters:  UY  U  TAN  A  KIN  PECH—just hear the way they talk!
said one Mayan to another upon her first contact with a Spaniard.


YU CA TAN, 1517, the white salt in the eye of the sun           ground into and then out of       the face traced on a block of limestone         by the side of the road.


Second displacement:      outside of Uxmal edging on cliffs:    as in the first, there's a curious use of the passive—here the second displacement was deployed—a key aspect of the displacements is a strange offset of agency—a grammatical displacement reinforces the physical one, allowing the sky to be derailed into ground with no one having actually had a hand in it.   And in the ground was a quarry and the limestone therein       where the quarry is quarried        the hunted home the hunted


down.       And according to at least one source, both meanings of the word—a site where stone is mined                 and the victim of a hunt—have roots in the Latin cor            which means heart, and the heart, in freefall in the photograph, posing as a sky is diving into the heart of the earth       with a violence that's practically electric        rending it open. The resulting map            builds up on your hands              on all hands and creates even more hands to contain it.


There was a smaller cliff     there was limestone mixed     and the clouds fixed into a matrix of other geological materials  silica and silvering      as a mode of answering      as if an echo among hills     could be heard among even more hands folding in.


Third displacement:  near Bolonchen de Rejon:    To drive there was to drive through butterflies     turning piles of rubbled limestone into a swarm


the mirrors tucked in and swallowtails imprinted thereon   wingdust eroding the fine polished surface           They seemed to fly through a sky of gravel.


Always available and timeless       said Smithson      of mirrors          but he was wrong—    they're blinding clocks in the brilliant sun      making every grain of dust       including every face      account for every second of itself.


An Aztec god used mirrors of black obsidian to tell the future          and the Olmec, mirrors of hematite to light ritual fires.


Fourth displacement:   Leaving Campeche, south along the Gulf coast, where the water is made of jade      we find the mirrors walking back up the beach        full of sea and its foam      colored in      now with the sea all broken down       you could pick up and hold       a perfect square foot of it     perfectly out of place.       Tidepools of sky, they were on their way to Champoton        full of mirrors that refused all reason.


And mirrors that insisted on silence    mirror as ether     in which forgetting      injects a raw color      found ever elsewhere      in water for instance    the fin of a dolphin    its own horizon     determined by a distance     measured by sun.       They traveled with the windows down and the rearview mirror always on.


Fifth displacement: jungle: its tangle, its greens insurmountable. The region has many names: The City of Snakes, The Fortified Houses, Stone Houses, and the Palisade, where they tucked the mirrors in among leaves and vines       reflecting the undersides of vines and leaves       ricocheting a living verdigris intensifying the humidity of seething greenery.


At Palenque the lush jungle begins     it's the reinvention of color     as torn into morning    braiding light through braided vines     and the mirrors


tear moreover     right through the history of the word color which, Smithson claims, means to cover   to hide    to conceal   as well as to save       something in a small box called a mirror.    There's another version of the


origin of the place name Yucatan: Mac'ubah than  (we do not understand)            why it is 1517      and why these Spaniards           are turning into the veins of these leaves and vines         that keep on turning. A mirror displaces everything for eons.        These days, mirrors occur whenever a plate of


float glass is silvered      often then backed by a layer of copper     and then by one of paint          sealing the light in ricochet.      The jungle begins at Palenque         pours into the mirrors      and overflows into windows               which are mirrors that no longer look back.


Sixth displacement:        Agua Azul: a series of gentle cascades, the highest only 20 feet in the Xanil River running swiftly in its tangible turquoise in its blue                    measure of cloud           the cirrocumulus
tracing in its feathers          the striations of wind layered       among the tarnished surfaces of air folded into sand   like a small congregation reading light         and replying in kind           the twelve aligned    and then the sun gets in your eyes.            They arrived in a single-engine plane, subject—as is everything but a mirror—to gravity. He mentions it particularly—molten river, iron water, stone lake while the plane's broken window acted as a third wing.


Seventh displacement:       Yaxchilan:       because they're tucked among the branches of a tree     a strangely haunting sheath      among a site of ruined monuments—for instance, a large stone stele that archeologists from who knows where took out of the place in dugout canoes, but then, not able to get it on a plane, back it came.    The Yaxchilan displacement is by far the greenest         and the only one vertical       among its shadows in ruins.         The architectural wreck of roots and vines gripped and finely patched in watercolor              diffused throughout water         is a mirror that the sun has entered         row by row blinding now    one by one      the row of mirrors      rebuilds the interior.


By this point in the project, the displacements have become a kind of charged cartography, mapping light as a shattering of the cardinal points that can nonetheless be traced through its calligraphic itinerary, the mirrors tracking a legible geometry.


Eighth displacement:       Arrived at the Rio Usumacinta, wondering what on earth the Island of Blue Waters could be.       And before us, a river running through a curve       returning annealed       the mirrors placed errantly     down a precipice     and everything that fell     onto any one of them          fell also into our eyes.      And thus, on the island of eyesight we strike degree zero.       Within any mirror        there's always another that looks out over a different world.


What shored up the river         shored up the mirrors       that shored up the time.   To shore as a verb      as another way to land.        How delicately we now read in the sun      staring full west         the twelve of us, stuffing the sun back into itself.


Ninth displacement: near Sabancuy   into the right and the left of it; never will they match             and the mirror is here to prove it.           Here, we're back in the green of it, mangrove of the gravenly, the issue of inches of growth per hour            the mirrors full of these same hours     but headed off elsewhere; we see, down in their deeps, that different sky and its different time, a sun that never stops       falling thought            through an open earth.




Italicized phrases are Smithson’s words.