Pylimitics

The year is 2063 and you were never interesting, writes lizleatrice. It’s a story about a person who would be 33 this year. This is about the age when screen time with social media “fills the dead spaces in your life.” Didn’t notice it at the time, of course, and although the narrator observes it, the subject perhaps does not.

In about  1524, Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola was a 21-year old artist who wanted to garner some attention from potential patrons, as you did then, in the Renaissance. Mazzola is better known as Parmigianino. He was exceptionally talented, and created what is probably his best-known work as what we’d call a portfolio piece: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. This is an image of it:

It’s a significant piece of art. Jacob Wisse described it in The Wall Street Journal in 2025:

“‘The painting depicts the young artist (then twenty-one) in the middle of a room, distorted by the use of a convex mirror. The hand in the foreground is greatly elongated and distorted by the mirror. The work was painted on a specially prepared convex panel in order to mimic the curve of the mirror used. “Along the very right edge of the composition the artist has even included an indication of the gilded wooden frame containing the portrait he is ostensibly working on, made visible by the acute angle of the mirror’s surface…. The sheen of the mirror is evoked in the lustrous tone of the artist’s forehead and right cheek; the texture of his garments by a range of brushstrokes…. As a support for the portrait, the artist even used a curved wooden panel that mimics the precise shape and size of the convex mirror he used to view his reflection”.’

Fifty years earlier, John Ashbery also described it, in the title poem in the collection Self–Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It’s a long and deep poem, and one stanza includes this:
  …The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increase
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.

Think about: The soul is a captive. Unable to advance much farther than your look.

And from lizleatrice:

You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home.
…The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. 

Art and literature are the ways we understand and tell ourselves about our condition. The human condition. Not just tell ourselves, but warn ourselves too.

Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.