It’s the audience that allows a performance to begin. After a year of lecturing live on screen, the professor registers the camera’s green light somatically. With one eye, during every class, she watches the twitch of her projected reflection. Every performer must learn to use the full range of her stage, and soon she can feel the four edges of the viewfinder. Each edge holds tension. She traces vision’s limits with her arms. Now when she speaks, her chin is tugged toward the light source by a string. Now the professor’s hands know right is left and left, right. Today’s Zoom class is the first in “History of the Panorama.” Every limit is a set of controls. Who is speaking? Not “I” anymore, an angle without audience, but a marionette, a woman elsewhere, everywhere else, everywhere strung into a frame.
A medievalist is a person who has agreed to a lifetime of interruption. A person working double time. At the initiation ceremony, every medievalist on the planet consented, at least once a day, to stop whatever she is doing, lift one finger, and say, “actually…” coughing to keep her voice bright. For the past thirty years, medievalists standing in front of classrooms have paused to correct the story that medieval artists were “bad at perspective” or hadn’t “discovered it” yet because they were an unwashed people pinned by the needle of fear to their present. The professor is this kind of professor. Her colleagues laughed—not unkindly—at her “Medieval Modernisms” proposal for their joint conference. Today she performs her duty for the tiled heads on a thirteen-inch screen. The fine-art school they attend believes that students should also be images, requires that they keep their personal cameras turned on for the duration of a virtual lecture. So one is a bowl of cereal in close-up. Another wears glasses that reflect a vaster TV screen. One is only miniature cleavage. Look, the professor says, coughing. A fourteenth-century rectangular painting floats opposite her digital projection. A flat image, she tells the class, “The Madonna of Humility,” an immortal virgin in blue and gold.
The pinlight pulses green. One student has his camera off, despite the policy—oh well. Another has walked away from her screen. The professor starts speaking again just before she magnifies the image, a trick she knows to help the listener make a transition. Look again, she says, zooming in for the grid of eyes. There’s the trumpeter Gabriel, kneeling in the corner, smaller than Mary not because he is farther away or longer ago than she is but because the angel isn’t there there. Not in Mary’s time, but haunting her like a promise kept. Gabriel is actually an inversion of what biblical scholars call the prophetic perfect tense, future events that are written in past tense because their happening is already so certain. Little Gabriel is a trace of the famous day that Mary was pierced by a tiny dove, the professor tells the screen, shot with a holy promise: not a micro-fetus or a narrow symbol but a stitch pulled from future time, a seminal frame so certain. In Mary’s lap the promised child grows heavy, gumming a nipple. He’s an adult baby, as we can see, cranking his beady gaze to meet what art historians like to call “the beholder.” Us, yes, but also them, the intended who are dead but see more than we do.
Every lecture is a kind of overview. But a banner notification distracts the incoming slide. Science Daily explains that humans and dogs communicate via eye contact, but cats don’t unless they’re taught to. The slender feline pupil is designed to be invisible to what it stalks. And some researchers think that a human eye has more white between the lid and the iris because it was a gaze designed to be perceived, even from an angle, by other human eyes. These scientists say that the feeling of being watched is no extrasensory skill, but only the experience of noticing, peripherally, at sharp angles, the eye whites of another human. They claim that the feeling of someone watching you from behind is only placebo. But some people, the professor thinks, are better trained than others. The news banner slowly recoils.
On screen the image of a bright, furred orb falls opposite the professor’s face. The class registers the shift in distance and their eyelids relax. The cord slackens. They know their teacher can see them, but she’s seeing elsewhere too. One student takes a bite. The Comet Book’s calfskin pages, the professor tells them, cataloged the large bodies of ice, dust, and rock that travel darkly through our solar system until they are fanned by solar winds and begin burning—or rather melting—a trail of gas that is visible, briefly, from earth. The first Comet Book was written in the sixteenth century. From there it traveled into the future under the protection of archivists and without the name of its author, who some suspect remained anonymous because she was a woman, as they say, of the cloth. It’s hard to know what that womanness was like, what the square sky looked like from a cloister’s yard. But the book’s medieval author wasn’t just interested in halos drawn by space gravel. Instead she compiled prophesies, folklore, and war journals, making drawings based on the memory of witnesses and on earlier comet books lost to time. The comet book categorized each comet by its portent, described the human impact one could expect from a certain long-haired star after it lime-lit a battle or swept its steep gaze over the field where, as she drew it, someone was squatting to pee.
The silhouette of the painted comet lingers for one student, though he squeezes his eyes closed and open several times. A retinal persistence, a green coal where the image swung too long on screen. His professor is speaking, but the orb floats before her like a censor. It’s the perception of novelty, she’s saying, not the proven invention, that inspires passion for newness—new worlds, women, clothes, technologies for rendering space. To build a computer that could travel inside the Apollo spacecraft, says the professor, MIT employed technicians to thread miles of filament through compact circuit boards. The circuits were the computer’s core memory. The rope of wire was memory’s highway. The stitching pattern was in binary code. One student squints, then checks her reading notes—this part wasn’t in the chapter. She glances sidelong at her fellow faces for a sign. The Apollo’s design was revolutionary, explains the professor, because it was so compact. And in 1965 the MIT team claimed that “girls” had more patience and focus for the task of threading the circuit’s pinlike holes, writing code with electrified wire. To thread each board with half a mile of filament, two technicians sat facing each other on either side of a circuit. Before automation, NASA had women and the spectacle of their aim. “Here we have a pair of girls who are wiring the memory,” explains the lab’s director on screen, “Now they pass the wire back and forth stored in the needle and put it through the core in a particular pattern.” The lab called them weavers, says the professor, but they were embroidering the way others had for a millennium, threading memory face to face.
Though she performs this lecture alone in her home, there are certain moments when the professor can sense a stiffening of attention, a fading or accelerating awareness outnumbering her through the screen. What would the eyeball scientists think? She knows that for the students, her only audience, a screen is also a measure of time. A video should not last more than two minutes, the class tells her, unless it is designed to play in landscape. An article should be no more than three phone screens long if they’re going to read it. A pixelated image is no image at all. The next slide in today’s lecture displays a room with an open window, a cue for the professor to tell her students what to see: The view out the painting’s window is blocked by an easel. The painted room’s curtains are deep, dry prune. Paris outside is partially obscured by the rectangle of the canvas blocking the rectangle of the sky. It’s Magritte’s The Promenades of Euclid (1955), a painting of a painting of a city view. A medieval understanding of perspective, the professor tells them, is partly useful in considering surrealist works like Magritte’s. Outside the window are his leering cumulus. The sky is his luminous Maya blue.
From her front porch, the professor sees a man walking toward her with an exceptionally tall head. He is wearing a backpack and moving along the sidewalk with a head that is five times the height of a human skull. The professor is certain he is not wearing a hat. His head seems light on his shoulders, easy to turn side to side, and just as wide as any face would be if it were stretched as tall as a baseball bat. The man is real. She can just make out the point of his regular nose balanced three feet above his neck. As usual, she tries to focus on the image, on the ticking in her heart, the fear—the hope—that she is witnessing something terrifying before depth and time can tender it. The professor began seeking illusions before she could speak. They remain her only notion of a time before language. Since then, peer-reviewed studies have found that children who pursue visual illusions are more likely to develop addiction later in life, though her own living has not yet corroborated that research. The light is too quick, as usual, and as the man crosses the mouth of an alleyway, the professor watches his real head dislocate from a shadow the street’s up-lighting made on the far wall as he passed. A small relief, and a greater disappointment.
The semester ends. The semester begins again. In academic time, progress is marked by starting over. Registration has resumed. Registration has closed. The campus has reopened. The professor has walked across the carpeted balcony of an empty lecture hall, carrying a notebook past the black-curtained stage where different professors pace in ticking shoes beneath art deco chandeliers. The lecture hall is attached to the Natural History Museum, a place one can find only through a practice of averted vision, as if not really trying to. The professor steps in and pauses to let her eyeballs adjust, though the landform behind museum glass is bright, lit precisely by dusty, angled bulbs. She can see for a mile and a half in three directions. She has emerged onto an island called Laysan, a Hawaiian atoll that was once home to eight million birds, now preserved behind glass. It’s the museum’s cyclorama, a preservation via illusion in the round. She writes down the name of the exhibit. In the center of the island is a large, oval lake, meaning the island is less like an island and more like an inner tube, more like a zero.
Sarah Minor
Sarah Minor is the author of Carousel: An Essay on Seeing(Yale University Press, 2026), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit(Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). Minor teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.