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In Fragments is an exploration of Life Art
Created by Jonathan Jennings Harris
    Ritual 19
    A ritual to honor the primordial lake with a collection of broken fired mirrors
    • Essay
    • Reflection
    • Pictogram
    • Tools
    • People
    • Places
    • Music
    • Stills
    • Credits
    View film (8:27)
    “Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible.”
    — Jacques Ellul

    To the Q’ero people of the Peruvian Andes, the most important principle to learn and practice in life is what they call “Ayni” — the understanding that everything in the universe is interconnected, and that a respectful balance must be carefully maintained through cycles of reciprocal giving. Similar notions of reciprocity abound in traditional cultures worldwide.

    In modern American culture, our mythology is “winner take all,” “every man for himself,” “survival of the fittest,” and “he who dies with the most toys wins” — encoding the brittle doctrine of selfishness into the psychology of our society.

    Even our modern environmental movement is grounded in a fundamentally economic view of reality, speaking in terms of “natural resources,” “carbon taxes, counting, and credits,” and other ideas that seek to collapse the living world into a series of quantifiable spreadsheets — as if nature were something “out there” to be objectively studied and managed.

    • The Gift — 1983

    When we forget that we are nature, that nature reflects us, that life is a mysterious hall of mirrors, we can start to lose faith in the exquisite gift of being alive.

    In his classic 1983 book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde describes this dynamic:

    Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.

    America’s primordial poet Walt Whitman offers a similar perspective in his 1855 Carol of Words:

    The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him;
    The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him;
    The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him;
    The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him;
    The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him;
    The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail;

    In this ritual, the cycle of In Fragments approaches completion. I visit a friend’s pine and spruce forest in the neighboring town of Charlotte, hoping to gather a collection of resin — the sticky “scar tissue” produced by coniferous trees to heal the “wounds” of broken branches.

    Tree spirits — one of them wounded

    I make an offering of three pieces of sea glass from the collection that I gathered as a child on summer evenings with my mother at the High Acres Farm beach.

    • Sea glass offering

    I use my childhood Bowie knife to harvest a few handfuls of resin. I thank the tree for sharing some of its healing with me as I leave.

    Harvesting resin

    When I return to High Acres Farm, my grandfather’s 125-year-old Adirondack birchbark canoe stands by the stables, awaiting repair.

    • Worn out vessel

    Since 1955, his canoe had hung from the ceiling of the “Trophy Room” building, with his many taxidermied animals below, as seen in Give Up the Ghost. The canoe is now seeing sunlight for the first time in over sixty-five years.

    • My grandfather Harry next to the water

    Its bark is dry and cracked in multiple places from decades of disuse and neglect.

    Cracked resin from former repairs

    At a small wooden table, I lay out the necessary tools — each carefully chosen.

    • Family tools

    I unload the harvested resin into my mother’s steel skillet, and set it to boil on the butane stove that I used in Give Up The Ghost — lighting the stove with my grandfather’s “HHW” monogrammed silver lighter.

    Cooking resin

    I pour the melted mixture through a white plastic strainer to separate the chunks of wood and bark and isolate its gummy glue.

    • Straining resin

    In a second steel skillet, I use my great-grandmother’s monogrammed “EHW” silver fork to cook a stack of bacon. I pour its grease into the monogrammed “JJH” silver dish that I received as a gift for my 1980 Christening.

    I mix the bacon grease with the harvested resin in a heavy iron melting pot, and set the concoction to boil until it foams over onto the table — placing the hot mixture on an old “Flower of Life” trivet to cool.

    Mixing bacon fat and resin

    Soon, I carry the warm solution to the canoe, and use my great-grandmother’s monogrammed silver spoon to spread the gummy resin over the splits and rips of the bark — gradually mending the “wounds” of her son’s ”vessel”.

    Repairing the birch canoe

    Finally, I lay a strip of fiberglass tape down the center of the vessel's hull, covering a large open split in the bark, re-enforcing the tree resin there. I mix up a concoction of West Marine epoxy resin and hardener, and apply it to the fiberglass tape — creating a strong and reliable seam at the center of the boat.

    • The resin-mended birch canoe — with a strip of epoxied fiberglass tape at the center of its hull

    With the canoe repair complete, I carry two steel buckets into the barn and up into the hayloft, returning to the mosaic of mirrors that I placed there almost six years before in Hall of Mirrors — now covered with layers of cobwebs, disintegrating wasp nests, and many seasons of dust.

    • Returning to the Hall of Mirrors

    I unlatch four old hay doors, one on each side of the building, as a way of opening up “the four directions” and inviting in the spirits of the land.

    Opening the directions

    I use my mother’s silver scissors to cut the “red thread” that’s been bounding the mosaic of mirrors for the last six years. I walk its perimeter, wrapping the string around my hand, and then use her scissors again to release the container entirely.

    Releasing the container

    The red thread is unexpectedly replaced by a single shaft of red sunlight streaming through a hay door, reaching to the back of the space.

    • Reddening light

    With an old wooden broom, I sweep the broken fired mirrors into a pile, and load them into two steel buckets and a pail — while wearing yellow gloves.

    Picking up the pieces

    I place the gathered mirrors by an open window at the western end of the hayloft, with a view to Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains in the distance.

    • Awaiting the water
    • Morning fog

    The next morning, a heavy fog has descended on the beach. The pail and buckets of mirrors stand by the water, surrounded by myriad linestones.

    • At the water

    I load the buckets into the newly mended canoe.

    Loading the mirrors

    I paddle out onto the water.

    • Going to see

    After traveling away from the shore, I select a piece of fired mirror and toss it into the lake. Two birds appear on the horizon, flying towards the boat. I take a second piece of fired mirror and toss it in as well — and just as the second mirror leaves my hand, the birds pass over the boat, as if by grace.

    • Two mirrors, two birds

    I continue feeding the fired mirrors into the water, seeding the lake with what will eventually become “sea glass” for future generations to discover — this time made not from the bottles of booze, but from the “fragments” of an ancestor’s story.

    Making sea glass
    • Fired mirror in water

    I paddle out farther, towards the center of the lake — the mended vessel feeling smaller and smaller in relation to the vastness of the water.

    • Open water

    A bird’s eye view reveals the iconic shape of the boat on the lake — with glints of sunlight shining from the mirrors as they tumble and fall through the water.

    • An open eye gazing up from this glassy plane of perception.
    • An orificial passageway into this motherlike body of water.
    • A “vesica pisces” portal to another zone of reality.
    • Standing at the threshold of above and below.
    • At the place where we end and begin.

    A flame appears, exploring a spiraling collection of sea glass. The offering is somehow acknowledged.

    Performed in 2021
    View film (8:27)
    Download text (PDF)
    • See Glass
      On balance and completion
      Published May 30, 2022

    Three circles are embraced by an arching set of lines that form the shape of an eye — or a canoe as seen from above, with three circular buckets within.

    • Bacon
      In 1 ritual
    • Birch Bark
      In 3 rituals
    • Birch Canoe
      In 2 rituals
    • Blue Boots
      In 4 rituals
    • Blue Clothes
      In 4 rituals
    • Blue Sponge
      In 2 rituals
    • Camera Kit 1
      In 21 rituals
    • Camera Kit 3
      In 3 rituals
    • Epoxy
      In 1 ritual
    • Fire
      In 9 rituals
    • Fired Mirror
      In 3 rituals
    • Glass Sheets
      In 22 rituals
    • Glass Stand
      In 22 rituals
    • Glass Tape
      In 1 ritual
    • Gray Clothes
      In 1 ritual
    • Iron Pot
      In 1 ritual
    • Iron Trivets
      In 1 ritual
    • Lake Water
      In 11 rituals
    • Red Scraper
      In 1 ritual
    • Red Stove
      In 2 rituals
    • Red Thread
      In 3 rituals
    • Resin
      In 1 ritual
    • Sea Glass
      In 2 rituals
    • Silver Dish
      In 1 ritual
    • Silver Fork
      In 1 ritual
    • Silver Lighter
      In 2 rituals
    • Silver Scissors
      In 2 rituals
    • Silver Spoon
      In 1 ritual
    • Steel Bucket
      In 5 rituals
    • Steel Knife
      In 1 ritual
    • Steel Pail
      In 5 rituals
    • Steel Skillet
      In 1 ritual
    • White Clothes
      In 14 rituals
    • White Paint Pen
      In 22 rituals
    • White Strainer
      In 1 ritual
    • Wood Broom
      In 2 rituals
    • Wood Paddle
      In 1 ritual
    • Yellow Gloves
      In 2 rituals
    • Electra Havemeyer Webb
      In 3 rituals
    • Harry Havemeyer Webb
      In 2 rituals
    • Jonathan Jennings Harris
      In 23 rituals
    • High Acres Farm
      In 24 rituals
    • The Barn
      In 6 rituals
    • The Beach
      In 11 rituals
    • The Boathouse
      In 3 rituals
    • The Stables
      In 7 rituals
    • The Woods
      In 6 rituals
    • See Glass
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      Download all stills from “See Glass” (39 MB)

    • Created by
      Jonathan Jennings Harris
    • Edited with
      Scott Thrift
    • Original music by
      Julio Monterrey
    • Filmed at
      High Acres Farm
      • Additional photography
        • Ssong Yang
        • Scott Thrift
      • Resin harvest filmed at
        • Narnia, Charlotte, VT
        • Luna House, Lincoln, VT
    Next
    • Essay 20
      Electric Webb
      A ritual to install a new “energy grid” using a network of “lightning transformers”
    In Fragments is an exploration of Life Art.
    • FAQ
    • Genealogy
    • Images
    • Music
    • Credits
    • Contact
    In Fragments is an exploration of Life Art
    Created by Jonathan Jennings Harris