infinity – n. that which cannot be counted or measured

I recently visited the Broad museum in LA with a friend and viewed Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, one of Yayoi Kusama’s infamous mirrored art installations. The use of mirrors and LED lights creates repetition and therefore a feeling of expansion in a small space. For 45 seconds (they will knock on the door at 00:00:45 to politely kick you out) I was immersed, a word I use sparingly for fear of understating its meaning.

My instinct is to describe that moment as a ‘flashbulb memory,’ an extremely detailed and vivid memory often associated with emotionally charged events. Part of me is tempted to use this terminology because of the imagerial connection it calls to mind – the lights in the mirror room were striking and transient all at once, like flashbulbs used to take old-fashioned photos going off everywhere.  

And yet when I reflect back on the quality of the memory, it is not exceptionally detailed and vivid. In my mind I can’t get a sense of my body in that space. I couldn’t perfectly describe to you the set up of the lights and platform in astute detail. So like a flashbulb camera in the literal sense and not the cognitive psychological sense, the moment was a fleeting intermingling of beauty and light shared with a close friend, leaving me with a somewhat blurred memory and a strong feeling. And just like that, we stepped back into the bustling lobby of the museum.

I truthfully didn’t think about the meaning of the artwork very deeply until about a week later. This particular piece has become such an icon in pop culture and social media, I had become desensitized to my reasons for seeing it and seeing art in the first place.

“…art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

A quote taken from one of my favorite books of all time, Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, as well as an example of art that makes me feel something. Of course if art also looks nice while making me feel something, I won’t complain. But those words have stayed with me, riding a raft on the lazy river of my circulating thoughts. 

I ask myself now, What did I feel when I walked into that mirrored piece of art? And why?

If you’re friends with me, you probably know that I am fascinated with the concept of time. Time travel, multiverses, alternate constructions of time, I never tire of pondering such complexities. So here I am in the realm of time talk again, aptly I suppose since the title of the work is Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.  

There’s irony in the contrast between the strict time limit that is imposed upon viewers of this work and the use of ‘infinity’ in the title. 45 seconds. That’s ¾ of a minute. 0.05% of a day. Or the time you get to spend in Infinity Mirrored Room. Putting it that way, in fractions of minutes or days, the time you spend in there seems so impossibly short. In the scheme of a human lifetime, it’s barely a speck, insignificant.

 And yet, when we take away human impositions on time, seconds, minutes, days, etc. we may begin to see such spans of time in a completely different way.

The time I spent in that mirrored room is no longer ‘45 seconds.’ It is ‘the amount of brightness that burns in the inside of my eyelids when I close them and think back to that day.’ It is ‘the number of light particles that hit my retina and lit up my brain to create an image.’ It is ‘the liters of blood that circulated through my arteries and veins to make possible the exact quantity of breaths I took inside of that room in that span of time reminding me that I am alive and living.’ In departing from the ticking of clocks, that moment transcends to become an infinity of sorts, rather than being defined by finite measurement.

With this broadening perspective, acknowledging the constraints of time as humans created it suddenly becomes freeing. Yes, life on this earth is finite and we are constantly measuring time as well as wanting to manipulate it. We ask for more time in moments where things are good and beautiful, and we ask time to hurry along when things are not so great. Yet our lives are not actually made up of the kind of time that runs on clocks or calendars, but the events that lie within this construction of time. And examining such events in this way can allow for an extension of our perception of time, just as Kusama’s mirrors allow for an expansion of space to create this particular eternity.

 I’m often thinking about the bounds of time in the context of how to best soak up every moment and really be there in order to “slow down time.” I once voiced my concerns to a friend, saying I was worried I wasn’t present enough, that I didn’t enjoy certain moments as much as I should have. But when she asked me, “What would you have done differently?”, I didn’t have an answer.

 I realized then that I had been so worried about “spending time wisely” and not wasting a single metaphorical sand drop of time, I pushed myself to unrealistic expectations of how to live moment to moment. I took the phrase “enjoy your time” too literally, for it’s not time itself I want to be enjoying, but the people and the moments, held in time but also timeless. The pressure of ticking labels and time constraints only made time feel more slippery, elusive, and much too quick.

 And so the concept of time becomes what we make it. The happenings in a minute can change life trajectories. A memorable day can live in memory for the rest of your life. 45 seconds can become an eternity.