I.

The eye-miniature entered the lexicon of love in the late 1790’s, as a subset of painted portraits depicting the left eye or the right, alone. Intended to be set in lockets, brooches, rings, and other ornamental objects, eye-minis (a.k.a. “lovers’ eyes”) were painted with watercolor atop a thin sheet of ivory—-a proper medium for aspirational jewelry.

According to “The Lens of Desire: Eye Miniatures”: “Luminous, exquisite, and fragile (a drop of water might wash away the tiny brushstrokes), lovers’ eyes did not mean, as it might seem, ‘I have my eye on you’, but rather, ‘You have my heart, and here’s my eye to prove it’.”

An eye for an eye, in essence. Though the eye functions as a gift rather than a subliminal surveillance device, it is hard to escape the presence of the gaze. It’s difficult to not feel somehow bound or seen by it.

II.

Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.

— George Trakl, “De Profundis” (translated by James Wright and Robert Bly)

**Sarah Goodridge,** ***Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait),*** **1828**

“…poetry loses itself to stay lost. There's something about what's unsayable, what can only be gotten at in these spaces between, in these things placed together and the juxtaposition that somehow sparks something for us.”

— Mary Hickman

III.

FOURTEEN SUBJECTS FOR A THEORY OF MINIATURES

A red box painted as a secret gift. Red to invoke a scarlet letter. Red because the flag is striped with it. Red because bloodshed is continuous in the game of democracy, and he is its elected representative.
“The ruins of thought itself . . . in terms of the possibilities that only the impossible may still offer.”
A small ethics. A minima. A sketch. Nothing so grand as a Maxi-Min principle. Nothing so practical and American. A red box with an image of her breasts painted on a slip of white ivory.
The family portrait a politician needs to present after winning an election to the House of Representatives. The role of representation: the people, the publics, the portrait, the self-fashioning, the perceptual drift. She will be its author. She will never marry.
A representational self-portrait with no head. A voiceless image. Eyeless but for nipples. An upset of the eye-miniature tradition.
“True are only those thoughts that do not understand themselves.”
She titles it Beauty Revealed (Self-Portait). The artist knows the game she is playing and decides to play the hand she has not been given. The purpose of art begins to resemble the purpose of the culture industry: to fabricate a self that can be traded, offered, transacted on the basis of ‘value.’
The addressable catastrophe must be undressed.
White gauze surrounding the bare chest, as if the clouds had decapitated the subject. The veiling and unveiling of dialectic.
Self-representation reveals “the point of encounter between an authority and an alien.”
By the time Daniel receives Sarah’s letter and the little red box she painted for him, its author has been alienated from it. The reader does the work of interpretation alone, at his desk. His take overrides her intent.
The Graeculi or “little Greeks” teach the Roman ruling classes in the 1st century. Does the little box teach the Congressman a little ethics inflected by irony?
The 10 a.m. of it all, continuously.
The morning’s machine in me, and the dream of Walter B.’s letter to Gretel where he expresses his refusal of psychology, holding it out on a limb like astrology. He wants to keep the stars, I think, so he rejects the system for the constellation, or the story we make of figurations. Any space of potential irrationality can ruin the machine.

[Quotations: Gerhard Richter; Adorno MM 192; Stephen Greenblatt]

IV.

“For love is ever filled with fear,” Penelope wrote to Odysseus in Ovid’s Heroides.

A vacuole is the void that holds the hole in the thing’s thingness.

“The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world,” said Natsume Sosaki.

“Speaking of ephemera, I read that Wagner’s home in Bayreuth has the composer’s copy of Henrich von Kleist’s Broken Pitcher on its shelves, with Wagner’s metrical marking scribbled inside it. Perhaps I am also speaking of modernity’s anxiety of influence,” wrote Michael Maar in “Deadly Poison: Kliest and Wagner”.

Ah, but “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge after staring at a blackbird.