Frances Lightbound

July 6-20, 2024

Bathe in the empyrean 

Gareth Kaye

For the site, but never of it, reflecting pools are too matter-of-fact for speculation to be of assistance. They are planar crystal balls that express an eschatology of the present: things are the same, just slightly different. Forever and ever. Amen. 

Distilling a temporality first remarked on by Rousseau, when recumbent in his boat and eyes fixated on the heavens, a time “without a single wish to recall the past or anticipate the future, where time appears avoid, and the present is extended without our noticing its duration…” 

Originating as a feature of Persian pleasure gardens, reflecting pools make an illusory space where the heavens are transposed and share the ground with earthly delights as if in tacit cohabitation. Post-aristocratic as we are today, reflecting pools occupy the dead zone of civic filigree. Like an aqueous attaché to the monuments and buildings whose architectural purpose implies a transcendent value, they proffer a rhetorical buttress offered by timeless liquidity. 

A reflecting pool is never incidental nor aleatory. We do not happen upon them so much as we were obviously predetermined to encounter them. A reflecting pool is always obdurately situated. A fluid addenda to a more manifest declaration of authority. They can take up a palazzo or be as small as a bird fountain. Size notwithstanding, their scales are the same. A pool is where it is and reflects what it reflects for a reason. Each pool is a collocation of daily life and its claim to peripheral divinity. Pivoting between supplication and asseveration, the duplicate image of socialized space doubles down on an elysian virtue in the eyes of a public who can see themselves reflected in tandem. 

In a better world, they might be alleviated of their duty as steadfast markers of parochial immortality and extend beyond the formalized sphere of civic engagement to the sites where the polis inhabits. We could propose reflecting pools for make-out points; reflecting pools for cancer wards; reflecting pools for farms; reflecting pools for playgrounds; reflecting pools for libraries; reflecting pools for late night dives; reflecting pools for hot dog stands; reflecting pools for corners where people congregate when the A/C isn’t cutting it; reflecting pools for your bed. All this so that our waking moments, and even our dreams that we might not remember, are in consubstantiality as our desire to govern ourselves as equally free and interdependent that political other that is a citizen. 

Holding the triumph of an eternally unperturbed and imperceptibly replenishing present, the architecture of a reflecting pool is geared towards the circumvention of anything that might agitate its venerable representations. Thus, they are set low in basins to avoid disturbances from wind and are usually absent of the water features common to their cousin, the public fountain, such as jets, streams and waterfalls. Oftentimes they are shallow (averse to depths which might invite motion): their truth is always skin deep and predicated on variability. 

Silent, supine mirrors, they consume what is plumb to and above them. What flies will swim and hierarchies melt into horizons. The apperceptive looking glass doubles the architecture and statuary that occupy its field, dislocating them from their life as earthly aspirants to empyrean ideals. Exchanging one firmament for another, reflecting pools hold their subjects – monuments, gardens, pavilions alike –  in idyll, initiating a transubstantiation from reflection to rhetoric, trope to truth. 

Of course the democratic principles panegyrically extolled on the water’s taut surface are not concepts immune to dissensus. In contrast to the out-of-time perfection portended to by many a reflecting pool, the practicable version of the ethics they enshrine are far from the tranquility expressed to the eye. In spite of all the careful architectural considerations, the pools, like the ideas they reflect, are prone to incursion.

Disturbing any image tasked with reflecting an ethos will naturally cast some aspersion onto the perfection of what is being represented – as all protest ought to. An outright intrusion into water; however, will not only agitate the crystalline perfection, but will form a new representation contingent on continual trespass. In revealing an object’s vulnerability to chance, that same object is shown to be something that was always already contingent upon it, and fundamentally tepid without it. To enter the reflecting pool – even just a dip of the toe – acts as a reverse baptism, wherein the watery ideal of democracy is the subject undergoing purification rather than the other way around. 

We should hope that the immutable relation between the water and its image may be a point where relations between precept and practice might be made whole once more. Through haptic agitation, one – but ideally many – may precisely rectify the profane disjuncture between architectonic gesture and political intent by transgressing the bounds of the image and wading into the shallows.  Upon entry into the field of the ideal, an individual’s body or object both disturbs and is absorbed by the picture. Wading into a reflecting pool, means entering into a particular, and ephemerally irrevocable articulation of the civic dream.