S04:E07 | Refract: On Mirror Rot, Idiosyncratic Inspo, and Hailing the New Year

Let's talk about mirror rot! And also how it inspired me to write this episode all about the agnosticism of inspiration, and how your idiosyncratic log of the year (whether it's in your phone's notes app, your watch history, your box of ticket stubs) can not only help you reflect on the year that's gone, but also take you into the new one with a cache of cool curios to fuel your creative practice.

Wishing you a wonderful New Year! Until next time, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine. <3

Resources

• Talkin' about burnout and the pressure of the vision board: S04:E06 | Rekindle: On Burning Out, Learning Grace, and Making Art for Yourself

IG: @littleoracles

Transcript

[Intro music]

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.

Hello again. I hope you’re well as we head into the tail end of this year, a time of reflection and resolution for a lot of people — and I talked about this in our last episode; about that all-too-common drive to check things off that list for the year; to kind of race toward some kind of annual finish line (and I’ll link that episode in the show notes if you didn’t catch it) — but today I want to talk about this, kind of, fulcrum period, when we’re looking back at the year that’s gone, and looking forward to the year that’s coming.

I know I’ve been casting back to a lot of important moments for me from this past 12 months, and, like, refracting them, and watching them bend as they pass through my memory — kind of like looking at a clouded mirror, you know, one that’s gone hazy with time and with the slow desilvering that, and maybe you’ve never heard this before, is called mirror rot.

And lest you think I’m waxing a little too poetic about reflecting on the year, let me let you in on a secret: I’m talking about mirror rot because, as with most ends of the year for me, I like to take time to sift through all the notes and quotes and bits and bobs I’ve taken down over the preceding year — kind of like reviewing a journal, but I don’t really journal so much as jot a million notes in my phone [chuckles] — but I do this to jog my memory, and to help me remember where I was and what I was thinking about, and what caught my magpie-like poet’s or writer’s or creator’s eye, and one of those things was, yes, a note that merely said “mirror rot.”

That’s it, that’s all it said. And it got me thinking, not just about what in the world mirror rot was, because I’d totally forgotten, but it got me thinking about the really pretty primo place that notes and jots and tiny ideas have in my creative process, and how, in the aggregate, you know, when I review them at the end of the year, they coalesce into this odd chronicle of curiosities and fascinations.

And largely, I’m drawn to words and names, especially when they’re unexpectedly lyrical; I’ll share a few more notes with you that I keep thinking about, and maybe you know these things, but maybe they’ll surprise and delight you as much as they do me — but, first, that the top vertebra of the human spine is called the atlas, named after the Titan, because it holds up the skull in a manner of speaking; and second, that the mechanisms beyond hours, minutes, and seconds on any given watch are called complications; and, third, that there is a type of gun sight called a ghost ring, which I found absolutely fascinating this year. I also found a note that said, very cryptically, “the irrationality of mountains,” and a note with this quotation: “I loved two women like no other man loved a woman and they both left me, so I chose the Bering Sea because she's good to me,” which might sound like something from Moby-Dick, but it’s actually verbatim from a man named Johnathan Hillstrand, who’s the Captain of the Time Bandit, a fishing vessel that is featured on the reality program Deadliest Catch. [chuckles]

And maybe these tiny tricks of language and expansions of meaning and surprising poetics don’t get you going the way they do me, but this is just to say: inspiration is everywhere; inspiration is agnostic of aesthetics and social context; inspiration is idiosyncratic; and, probably most important, inspiration is just the inhalation: it’s the breath that changes compositionally when it’s exhaled — when it’s turned into something that you’ve created. I can take in those notes about love on the Bering Sea and the irrationality of mountains and, yes, mirror rot, and transform them into a piece of my own, like a poem, or a lyric game, or this podcast episode; I can look them over and line them up and start my year with a whole cache of, like, glittering fragments and fractals to inspire my creative practice in 2025.

And you can do this, too: so if you’re looking to set your creative intentions or make your maker resolutions for the New Year, remember: you don’t have to whole-cloth it; you don’t have to from-scratch it; you don’t have to conjure it all from the ether, because I’m sure you’re sitting on your version of the rotted mirror; your catalog of thoughts and charms and sudden obsessions that can be the fodder for your year as a creator.

So as we close out 2024 and head into 2025, I invite you to find your log, your chronicle, your journal — and it doesn’t have to be a literal diary; if you’re like me, it could be your notes app, or it could be your checkout history at the library, or the notebook you carry in your back pocket, or your watch history on whatever streaming platform you use, or the ticket stubs you saved from the movies or plays or art shows you went to, or the photos you took of every meal you ate, or your Spotify Wrapped list, or the box of prototypes you made of your latest invention, or your cabinet of estate sale objets, or even your social media feed — whatever shape your record takes, I invite you to just take an hour and look through it. Recall and reflect on your year, think about where you were in January, where you are now, how all the inspiration you’ve collected and osmosed over the year, how that captivated you, or changed you, or compelled you, even, and how you could keep cultivating those curiosities and those fascinations in 2025, irrespective of form or fettle, irrespective of social imprimatur, irrespective of direct correlation to whatever you’re working on now. Just breathe it all in; then, let it all out: recast, reshaped, and renewed.

And that’s it for this one; I wish you all good health and a heaping helping of wonder in the New Year. You can find me at arthograph — that’s a-r-t-h-o-g-r-a-p-h — on both Instagram and Bluesky, and if you’re looking for more big book energy and creativity content, you can find every episode of the podcast at little oracles dot com. Until next time, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]

[Secret outtake]

[singing quickly, in a funny, warbly tone] Should old acquaintance be forgot / In the days of auld lang syne? [chuckles, sighs; speaking] Okay, okay. [exhales] Let’s get real: Happy New Year take one.