`A Gratuitous Reality That Exists for You Alone'

Some meteorological condition unique in my experience to the Northwest results in the occasional disappearance of the horizon. I reach the crest of a hill and below me opens a broad sea-, sky- and landscape. Mist otherwise invisible combined with some precise angle of sunlight erases the customary line between sky and water. Only by looking to the left and right, where sky meets land, can I triangulate the horizon’s approximate location. The effect is briefly like vertigo, a Magritte-like sense of spatial disorientation and a reminder that perception is flawed and incomplete, never absolute, and always based in a specific relation of seer to seen.

In a sense, the horizon does not exist without a human to perceive it. We expect to see a line as straight and clean as one drawn by a draftsman, where the sky “meets” the land or sea. When it fails to keep its appointment, we are disappointed, dizzy or delighted, depending on our temperament. The effect is similar to a mirage seen at the end of a long, hot highway – another sort of virtual geometry.

Saul Steinberg, like his friend Vladimir Nabokov, specialized in such trompe-l'œil effects, usually with comic intent. He loved drawing landscapes in which he could play tricks with reflections and the draftsman-like geometry of the horizon. Go here to see an untitled drawing from 1977 which is reproduced on the cover of Reflections and Shadows (2002), a slender collection of Steinberg’s interviews from the nineteen-seventies with his friend Aldo Buzzi. While discussing why reflections inspire humor, Steinberg says:

“Reflections in water belong to this kind of poetic strangeness. It is a great joy for me to observe them, especially on hot days, when the light is perfect and the strangest symmetries are generated: two swans swim toward each other, with two other reflected swans, perhaps a heraldic insignia. Tropical islands, doubled ships, trains passing upside down over a bridge, the moon. Everything with perfect colors. If you look only at the reflection, and not at the reflecting part, you see a gratuitous reality that exists for you alone.”

“Gratuitous reality” – both free-of-charge and unnecessary – is a charming notion and a useful definition of art, as in invisible horizons, mirages and the works of Saul Steinberg. For the observant, the world is charged with poetic strangeness.