Object of Study: Mirror
I could begin by saying that mirrors are useless if no one looks in them.
Or: the history of mirrors is the history of (self-)contemplation.
*
I could begin when I arrived in Madrid. Not the moment I landed at Barajas Airport, and not the first few weeks when the day-to-day still felt like a vacation. Begin then, with my real arrival, once the initial excitement is behind me and I find myself in a new country, a new bedroom, a new routine. I may not want to, but I think I need to reinvent myself in this place, or at least get to know myself again. Who am I here? For weeks, I’m uncomfortable in my own skin. I search for my reflection in every surface, making sure my feelings haven’t broken out like a rash. I remember one of Idea Vilariño’s poems. She wants to buy a mirror, hang it in the bathroom, and look at herself: “How else can I find out who I am?”
An experiment:
Go into the bathroom. Close the door. Turn off the light. Search for a reflection. Fail to find it. Open the door. Let in light from the hallway. The face appears in sections. It takes shape little by little. First, an outline. Then the dark frames of the glasses. Finally, the nose and eyes. Touch the surface of the mirror. Note the space between the hand and its double, the chill of the glass. Close the door. Watch the self disappear. A thin strip of light filters in underneath the door. Eyes wide open. In the darkness, look for signs of the reflection. Feel its presence.
I could begin like this: facing the mirror, searching for my own countenance, I let the light in.
I could begin with the first mirrors in the world. A riverbank, a puddle after the rain, a bowl of water. No contortion allowed the full body to be viewed; to lean too far over the edge was to risk falling in. Later, with the advent of the first tools, people polished fragments of obsidian until the shadows gave forth their reflections. The Egyptians regarded themselves in bronze mirrors. The Chinese in mirrors of jade and metal. The Greeks in round metallic mirrors with handles and embellishments. In the span of six thousand years, humanity went from rock to polished metal, from obscure to opaque. Until, in the first century B.C., the first silver-coated mirror was made in Anatolia—but its surface wasn’t even, the reflection wasn’t perfect.
*
I could begin today: December 23. I meet up with a former roommate from Iowa, a poet, at La Duquesita, a pastry shop near Alonso Martínez that’s been open since 1914. The shop and its desserts do credit to its name, “the little duchess.” Its walls are white, and its tiny black-and-white checkerboard floor tiles are laid out in diamond patterns. In two glass display cases, miniature brownies, fruit tarts, and cakes with sugar icing glisten under the lights. There’s a long line, but we have our hearts set on coffee and croissants, so while my friend waits to order, I grab a table on the left side of the shop. I amuse myself by describing everything around me. At the back of the room, there’s a large mirror in a thin frame made of light wood. Two more mirrors—one at my back, the other facing me—flank the room, making the space seem larger than it is. I twist around to take in my own face, and then the reflection of the candelabras and the line of people moving forward little by little. Finally, I study the mirror itself. It’s riddled with black spots, as if someone had attacked it with wild brushstrokes. I notice how these oxidized stains afford the mirror, the whole pastry shop, a veneer of age.
I take pictures of the spots; my reflection observes them from a corner of the frame. I think of the other mirrors I’ve seen around Madrid, covering the walls of Café Barbieri and other locales my friend deems “bars of yore,” and how the dirty, stained mirrors in these places give off an air of neglect and antiquity. Does time slowly eat away at them? Is it our collective destiny to turn back into a dark surface that absorbs light instead of reflecting it?
*
I could begin with the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. For a thousand years it guided vessels through the Nile. At the top of the marble and glass tower was a metallic mirror reflecting the sun by day and a fire by night. The ray it cast could be seen from fifty kilometers away.
I could describe Archimedes’ heat ray. He was born in the second century B.C., exactly one year after construction on the lighthouse began. Later writers tell us that, during the Roman invasion of Syracuse, Archimedes used a burning mirror to reflect sunlight, focusing it into a ray that set fire to the invader’s ships.
Or I could describe Aristotle, who wrote that if a woman looks into a polished mirror while she’s menstruating, a reddish smoke will cloud its surface. The next time I’m on my period, I eye myself in the mirror defiantly.
I could admit that I’m overwhelmed by all these interesting facts and the challenge of narrowing down my research topic. I rotate between the present and the past, the experiential and the theoretical, the poetic and the scientific. Something at the center of these revolutions escapes me, even as I try to focus on it. I remember that this is not a historical essay, nor a treatise on physics, nor an autobiography. It’s the search for a concave surface where I can collect my thoughts into a ray that sets fire to whatever it touches.
*
I could begin with my first mirror, a glass rectangle with an aluminum coating. The wavy shapes carved into its reddish wooden frame give it the effect of being covered in leaves. I regard myself in it. Standing, I can only see my reflection from the waist up. To see from the waist down, I have to balance precariously on my rolling desk chair. I bought the mirror on a trip I took to San Miguel de Allende when I was fourteen. All my savings in return for the privilege of looking at myself. I’d like to be able to recall my teenage desire in detail so that I can record it, but the object alone remains.
Six months after buying the mirror, I came home from school and went straight to my room. At first, I didn’t know what was wrong. I went back out and reentered a few times—then realized my mirror wasn’t there. It used to hang between the bed and the desk, lined up with the door. When I asked what had happened, my mother answered that the mirror had fallen that morning. The frame was intact, only the glass had broken. She said she’d take it to get it fixed.
The mirror reappeared the next week. I realized it was there for the same reason I had noticed it was gone. I had become accustomed to seeing myself as I came through the door, crossed to the bed, dropped my backpack. The day my mirror disappeared, I didn’t miss the object: what was absent from the wall was my reflection.
*
I could begin with a painting. A nude woman reclines on a bed. Her back is turned to us, and she’s looking into a mirror held up by a cherub. We see her face in it and assume she’s gazing at herself. The painting is Diego Velázquez’s Venus at Her Mirror. It plays with our perception, makes us forget that if we can see her face in the mirror, she can’t be looking at herself, but rather at the painter: that is, at us.
I don’t know how old I was when I fully grasped this phenomenon, but I can remember learning it. I remember putting it to the test in the car, waiting for physics to fail. I focused on the Physicist’s face in the rearview mirror, sought out his eyes, and asked if he could see me too. He nodded with a smile and explained yet again that when light is reflected off a surface, the angle of incidence is always equal to the angle of reflection. I recall the feeling of imagining my reflected face as he must have seen it, wondering whether it was the same as the one I saw each morning.
When it comes to mirrors, it’s impossible to look without being seen.
*
Many years later, I find myself thinking about the Venus effect again. I’m taking a taxi along Viaducto Tlalpan. I requested the cab by phone, so it’s theoretically trustworthy, but that’s not enough to chase away my paranoia. I carefully observe the driver’s face in the rearview mirror, calculate the probability that he’ll harm me, and rehearse various escape routes in my mind. As I run through all the advice I’ve ever read, I grip my cell phone, ready to call home. I’m scanning for the tiniest gesture to justify my nervousness. I remember too late that, if I can see him, the driver can see me. He could hold my gaze, realize what I’m thinking, or worse, monitor me while I’m distracted. I shift slowly until my reflection is visible. In addition to my unease, I also feel ashamed for forgetting something so basic.
*
I could begin today: Christmas Eve. The Poet invites me over for dinner with her family. Ever since my fellow residents left Madrid, my routine has been the same each day, until now. I’m not in the holiday spirit, maybe because it’s the first time I’ve spent Christmas without my parents, or maybe because they don’t decorate the Residencia. When I get to her house, the Poet takes me to her childhood bedroom, and the first thing I notice is that the doors of her closet are one continuous mirror. She plugs in a string of Christmas tree lights and sits down on her bed; we stare at our reflections silently. A year ago, we were living together: a door led from her room to mine, and we shared clothes and mirrors. We were so comfortable around each other that we didn’t censor our thoughts when we got ready to go out, but listed off our insecurities aloud: big thighs, low-cut shirts, the dark circles under our eyes, the length of a dress.
I want to talk about the first mirrors that find their way into our rooms when we’re little girls. I want to talk about the moment when we go from just wanting to look at ourselves to judging ourselves. I want to talk about the people who go on mirror diets—they cover up or hide all the reflective surfaces in their homes, learn to put on makeup by feel, and stop observing themselves for days or months. They say they have more self-confidence right away. I want to talk about the fact that the majority of my female friends feel self-critical when they look in the mirror. I want to talk about how the Poet’s younger brother doesn’t have a wall of mirrors in his room. I want to talk about these things, but I don’t know whether I have anything new to say.
I could begin with the steps involved in making a mirror. First you need a sheet of perfectly polished glass; any imperfection will distort the image. The sheet of glass is covered with a layer of silver or aluminum, heated to its boiling point and allowed to vaporize onto the surface. The trick is to create a uniform covering. In 1835, Justus von Liebig invented the process of silvering, ceasing the production of mirrors coated in mercury and lead. Silver turned out to be a very good reflector, but the problem was that it had to be sealed by a layer of protective backing. In 1930, the procedure for using aluminum was finally discovered, and that’s why most mirrors today are made from this much more stable metal. The decaying mirrors at La Duquesita and many other bars in Madrid must be made of silver. When the material insulating a silver mirror’s coating is damaged or aged, humidity can pass through it. The water molecules then react with the metal and corrode it. I scribble a simple equation in my notes. It’s satisfying to balance, and I’m proud I haven’t forgotten how to do it. Ag2NO3 + H2O → Ag2O + 2HNO3. I circle the Ag2O, silver oxide, and imagine my mother sitting at the kitchen table with the box of my grandmother’s tarnished cutlery. With a cloth, she cleans each piece until it’s shining again.
I go back to La Duquesita and find myself surrounded by its mirrors once more, in the same spot as my first visit. I observe their imperfections. Now I understand what they are, what they’re doing there, and what they mean. I sense a newfound connection with Madrid’s bars—it’s as if, now that I’ve grasped this fact, I’ve suddenly earned the right to inhabit not just this place, but the whole city.
*
I could begin today: December 29. On weeknights, the streets between Lavapiés and La Latina, where El Rastro market is set up on Sundays, are practically empty. I run into a few kids playing ball in a plaza; people with lowered eyes hurrying home from work; and groups of men shouldering their blankets full of handbags and shoes to sell, talking in languages I don’t understand. I walk in circles. I avoid taking out my phone, and instead explore the narrow streets as I try to reach the Tirso de Molina plaza, unsure which direction to take. Far from Mexico City, I relish the privilege of walking alone at night. I stop to take pictures, peer into dark display windows, enjoy myself in each plaza. Between Christmas and New Year’s, Madrid lies under a strange calm.
As I turn around in yet another steep, narrow, curving street, I come across some broken crates and two shattered mirrors. I eye myself in the pieces still leaning against the wall. Their cracks fragment my image: my legs in one segment, my arm in another, half of my face over there. The Romans believed that mirrors revealed your soul, and that, if you broke one, you also splintered a piece of yourself. The seven years of bad luck ascribed to whomever broke a mirror were the number of years it took the Roman soul to heal. I wonder what superstition they would have about a nail that gives way and a mirror that breaks on its own. Maybe the confusion I felt when I got home from school that day to find my reflection missing was, in fact, the reaction of a person with a cracked soul. Did replacing the glass repair it? What gets lost in these instances?
There’s something disquieting about a broken mirror abandoned in the street. A personal attack.
*
I could begin with Jacques Lacan, who described how children react when they first encounter their own reflection. He gave the name “mirror stage” to the phase of an infant’s psychological development when they begin to recognize their own likeness. Children react to mirrors with glee, but this first self-identification, Lacan tells us, is imaginary. Without the help of reflections, seeing our full image would be impossible, and this affects how our identity is formed.
*
Philippe Rochat proposed that self-awareness is developed between the ages of six months and five years, in five levels: that is a mirror; in it is a person; that person is me; that person will always be me; what I see is the same thing others see when they see me.
Some mornings, I suffer through this entire process again. I am that person. What I see unsettles me. That person will always be me. I don’t recognize her, she doesn’t fit my vague idea of who I am in my mind. What I see is the same thing others see when they see me. It seems so unfair that other people know what I look like better than I do.
Lacan says the dissociation we feel when we look in the mirror comes from the way we perceive our own likeness in pieces. Hands on a keyboard, a torso at a desk, legs disappearing under the table. This close to myself, I can hardly grasp the whole I make up. Every idea I have of myself is imaginary, which makes me feel helpless. I’d like to think I know myself, but even in this most basic aspect of who I am, I come up against an obstacle. So I think through all the mirrors I’ve ever encountered, and their different versions of my reflection. I try to endow the experience with fresh significance. As I’m writing, I sometimes lose the thread of what I’m trying to articulate, question whether it’s working, and feel the need to draw on an external gaze. With the same vulnerability of someone asking, “Do I have food in my teeth?” or “Does it look like I’ve been crying?” I ask, “Do you see this text as I see it?”
*
I could begin with a chimpanzee in front of a mirror. He touches the glass, observes his nostrils, sticks out his tongue, shows off his genitals. He rubs the spot of white paint on his forehead until it’s gone. He has passed the mirror test: he is conscious of himself.
Orangutans, dolphins, killer whales, elephants, capuchin monkeys, rhesus macaques, magpies, and even ants look in the mirror, understand that they are the image they see, and try to rub off the mark the researchers have put on their bodies. Before the age of a year and a half, human babies react to mirrors with fear or curiosity; they don’t associate the person they see with themselves. Gorillas will sometimes look away, cover themselves in shame, or attack the mirror—and fail the test.
The ability to see oneself in the mirror is as close as we can get to measuring humanity. But what about dogs, whose sight is worse than their sense of smell? Does recognizing the scent of their own urine, identifying an “I was here,” make them conscious of themselves? Recognizing our own likeness isn’t proof of the awareness of self. Maybe it’s all nonsense, and it doesn’t matter. But then again, despite its flaws, it’s the only experiment that tests whether other species experience consciousness.
I still can’t forget the feeling of looking at myself in the mirror when I was twelve, recognizing this taller, curvier, changing body as my own. I did the same thing not long ago, the day before I had surgery to remove a small lump of fatty tissue from my left breast. Standing in front of the mirror, I thought, “Take a good look, remember yourself at twenty-six, before you got a new scar.” Is this vanity, or is it self-recognition? Why do I feel the need to withdraw into myself when I’m sounding out a new environment? Does it comfort me to open my closet door, regard myself in the mirror hanging there as Vilariño did at the age of eleven, and tell myself here I am?
*
I could begin today: January 1. At night, the window in my room turns into a mirror. From my seat, I study my reflection, punctuated by the lights of the city. It’s a partial reflection: I can see myself and beyond myself. It’s also a double reflection: my image and its shadow, because of the double panes of glass protecting me from the winter weather. Experiments show that 4% of light always bounces off glass, while the remaining 96% goes through it. Photons from my desk lamp hit my face, some bounce off it toward the window, and 4% (always 4%) return to my eyes.
Richard Feynman begins his book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter with a warning: he will tell us how nature works, but we can’t understand why it behaves in the way it does. We’re in good company: no one knows.
We know how photons act, such that our measurements always give 4%, but we don’t know why. Likewise, when we look in the mirror, we recognize ourselves, but we don’t understand how or why we do. As I study myself in the window, I think how much more useful mirrors would be if only they allowed us to see beyond—but even so, like Idea Vilariño, I see my face and believe it’s the only possible one. All my internal images are erased, and I’m left with just my face speckled by the lights of Madrid. That is me.
*
I could begin with a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It concludes that people are more productive with a mirror in the room, because if they’re conscious of themselves, of occupying a space, they’re more likely to pause, consider what they’re doing, and improve their performance. A mirror in a room has the power to capture the gaze. This happens to me when I catch sight of myself in car windows, or in the reflections of storefronts as I walk by. If I write in cafés with lots of mirrors, I don’t stare at them constantly, but I’m conscious of my body’s copy in the periphery of my vision: its movements, its outline.
I remember the afternoon I spent with an ex-boyfriend in a hotel room with a mirror on the ceiling. I felt uncomfortable every time I noticed my reflection. I remember my aversion, how quickly it distracted me from what I was doing to see a bit of my skin out of the corner of my eye. I turned my back to my double, ignored it, tried to forget it was there.
When I tell the Poet about this, she laughs and says she likes looking at herself in the mirror when she’s having sex. I’m surprised by my own modesty, and I can’t seem to explain that it wasn’t my body that bothered me. The repulsion I felt came from having to confront my own image in a moment that could have been pure sensation, not contemplation; I would’ve liked to forget myself entirely. I’m always trying to ward off my own self-consciousness—it inhibits me, pulls me out of the present, distracts me, and forces me to think instead of feel.
*
I could begin with the mirror I bought when I moved to Iowa, the first time I lived alone. That’s when I learned how easy it is to alter a reflection. All it took was propping my full-length mirror at an angle, not just so that it wouldn’t fall, but so my body appeared taller and thinner.
An easy way to modify mirrors is to curve them. Concave mirrors curve inward, collecting light and reflecting it so it converges at a point. They’re used in telescopes for observing stars, and in bathrooms as magnifying mirrors for putting on makeup. Convex mirrors curve outward, toward the light, enlarging the field of vision and distorting object size, like the side-view mirrors on cars. But since they’re mounted inside their covers, we never remember that “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”
*
I could begin today: January 2. I turn off the lights in my room, light a candle, and sit on the floor, facing the mirror on the inside of my closet door. I start a timer and stare into my eyes. It’s hard to sustain my gaze. Time and time again I surprise myself, suddenly realizing that I’m observing my nose or the reflection of the light on my glasses. I take a deep breath and restart the timer. I concentrate on counting my eyelashes to make myself look into my eyes. They’re dark, small. Suddenly, I lose focus, and my face blurs. I see shadows out of the corner of my eye. I get vertigo. I break my gaze and fix it on my hands instead, but the churning in my stomach doesn’t go away. I close the closet door, stop the timer, and turn on all the lights in the room. To calm myself down, I remember that the visual system is conditioned to recognize faces. That’s why it’s so easy for people to see the Virgin Mary or Jesus in the clouds, in trees, or in cracks in the wall. In dim light, edges are muddied, so our specular face gets blurry. Even though I know this, I don’t try the experiment again.
Any distortion in a mirror alarms us. If I raise my left arm, my double raises its right arm. The brain interprets our reflection as vertically inverted because our body is symmetrical in that direction, but that’s incorrect. The inversion is from back to front. The reflection is a negative, a projection through ourselves. Just as light shining through a sheet of paper allows us to see what’s written on the other side, but in reverse, our reflection is an impression of light on the mirror. This can be corrected by placing two mirrors perpendicular to each other, allowing us to see ourselves as others see us, without inversion. In 2015, a Spanish company announced that it had begun marketing this type of “real image” mirror, enabling users to see themselves in three dimensions.
More than once, I consider buying one online so I can experience what it feels like to really see myself. But the memory of my experiment stops me, the vertigo I felt when I studied myself by the light of a candle, and I wonder if the sensation would be even more unsettling if I were seeing a reflection that showed my real image.
*
I could begin with a photograph. I’m standing on the threshold of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Behind me are a bunch of tourists. Although my family and I had gotten lost in the fog trying to find our way to the palace that morning, it was sunny when we took the photo. At the time, I didn’t know that the hallway was not only a show of Louis XIV’s opulence and power, but also proof that the French had managed to steal the island of Murano’s secret method of making mirrors.
For a hundred years, the council of Venice had defended their monopoly; the best glass and the best mirrors came from the island of Murano. But Louis XIV wanted to surround himself with mirrors. His ancestors had not had the luxury of looking at their full bodies in a mirror, and the closest thing to a reflection was a portrait. On my first trip to Paris, I insisted on posing for a portrait from a street artist at the base of Sacré-Coeur, even though it was the coldest day of the trip. The likeness we see in a mirror isn’t more exact or more real than a painting, but it ages with us. My mirror still hangs between my childhood desk and my bed; that French portrait is in some closet, forgotten. In it, I’ll always be fourteen. How old is the image of myself I hold inside? Maybe it’s also fixed, and that’s why my own face surprises me sometimes. That is me.
The artist began to be the subject of her own paintings in the fourteenth century, when mirrors had become more affordable. All throughout the month of December, alone in the Residencia, I think and write about mirrors; when I look into them, they invariably reflect me. I don’t want this project to appear to be a self-portrait, but I can’t ignore the fact that these thoughts have a body. They aren’t just suspended in the ether.
*
I could begin today: January 5. Álvarez Gato alley is near the Plaza de Santa Ana. As we get closer, I realize I’ve passed by here many times. The Poet guides me to the entrance to the pedestrian alley. There’s no sign of the nineteenth-century ironmonger’s shop with its two curved mirrors hanging outside the door to attract clients. On both sides of the street, taverns are built one after the other, with apartments on the upper floors. Flanking the door of the bar Las Bravas hang replicas of the concave and convex mirrors of days gone by. They’re smaller than I had imagined. We take ourselves in—the concave mirror squishes us, the convex one stretches us out. Ramón María del Valle-Inclán created an entire literary genre out of them: esperpento. The day before, I’d read the part in Bohemian Lights when Max Estrella talks with Don Latino about the mirrors in Álvarez Gato alley, calling them absurd. He wants to deform them, just as he and Don Latino are deformed in them. Max Estrella declares: “Spain is a grotesque deformation of European civilization,” much as the reflection is of his likeness.
I tell the Poet what I’ve been writing: about the reflections I find around Madrid, and what it feels like to study myself in the mirror. But she tells me she experiences seeing herself differently. She never forgets her own image—it follows her wherever she goes, immense, overwhelming. Every glance in every mirror reveals the same defect, a disproportionate size she has learned isn’t real. “What I see isn’t what others see.” She doesn’t need curved mirrors, her brain already does the work of deforming her likeness so that it’s grotesque to her. Every morning when she gets dressed, she follows the same routine I do: she picks out clothes she’s excited to wear, eager to see herself as she is. But then she looks in the mirror, regards her body, and, despite the anxiety, forces herself to remember an admonition that has become a personal mantra: “What I see isn’t me, because I don’t know how to see myself.” I can’t tell her I don’t understand, or that I instinctually think: at least that doesn’t happen to me. I suppress the thought, grab her hand, and find it’s hot.
No one fits between my reflection and me. But as we talk, I step to the side and let the Poet enter the text, and she returns my gaze.
*
I could begin with an experiment published by the University of Liverpool. It asks us to imagine that we’re standing at the bathroom mirror. Imagine it in detail. Our hands resting on the white sink. The blue-tiled wall behind us. Containers of various sizes, full of liquids and creams, are grouped together with the soaps and toothpaste, the landscape of a routine. Now that we have the scene in our minds, we have to hold it there while answering two questions: What size is the copy of your face in the mirror? What would happen to it if you started walking backward?
Most people answer that the size of their reflected face is equal to the size of their real face, and that as they back up, the image gets smaller.
Most people are wrong.
It’s nothing more than a game of light and angles.
*
I could begin by putting the experiment to the test. With one eye closed, I trace the outline of my face on my closet mirror with a blue dry erase marker. It’s impossibly small. I take a step back, and my face fits perfectly. One more step, another, another, but no matter how much I back up, my face stays its original size. Leaving the blue marks there, I go out into the hallway and knock on my neighbor’s door. He’s a mathematician. I explain what I’m doing, that I know it’s counterintuitive. But for him, it makes all the sense in the world.
We repeat the experiment. Our faces maintain their size regardless of how far we are from the mirror.
I tell him I don’t get it, and that if I don’t understand it, I can’t write about it. He asks me to imagine that what I see is just reflected light, and that the mirror is a flat, two-dimensional surface halfway between the real image and the virtual image. He tells me that the space around us has Euclidian geometry, but we see it in hyperbolic geometry. “Sounds beautiful,” I say, “but tough to imagine.” He explains that when train tracks disappear on the horizon, appearing to converge at a single point in infinity, that’s an effect of hyperbolic geometry. Standing at his closet mirror, identical to mine, he tells me that we perceive angles and not sizes, that what we see in the mirror is something of an optical illusion, a mirage.
*
I could begin today: January 7. For my birthday, I buy myself a kaleidoscope because, with all this writing about mirrors, I can’t stop thinking of the one I had as a kid. I want to recreate the memory of twisting it to produce a collage of fragments, giving way to ever-new combinations as they shift.
These toys drove English society wild in the nineteenth century. Kaleidoscope factories couldn’t keep up, and demand quickly outpaced supply. At first, they were just entertainment for adults. Now you can buy kits with all the supplies you need to build one yourself. You need a tube, such as a paper towel roll, three mirrors, and tiny colorful pieces of glass or plastic. The mirrors are placed inside the tube, forming a triangle. When one mirror is reflected in another, an infinite plane is created. But, if the mirrors are placed at an angle, the duplication becomes symmetrical, covering the entire surface. The duplication extends without creating any gaps or overlaps when the mirrors form an equilateral triangle. I spend a lot of time trying to spot the smallest unit, the original triangle out of which the others sprout, and although sometimes I think I’ve found it, other times it gets away from me.
Days later, I realize what I bought isn’t a kaleidoscope, but a teleidoscope. Instead of colorful fragments, it has a magnifying glass, and whatever’s outside it forms a picture that gets broken down and multiplied. I like pointing it toward lights or colorful objects. It’s a decomposition scope, allowing me to twist and separate whatever surrounds me into geometric forms and colors, to zoom in or to gain distance. I think it’s a good metaphor for what I’m writing. With each rotation, I search these images, these words, for new shapes and other ways of seeing.
*
I could begin with the idea of the virtual. In physics, the virtual has an apparent existence but isn’t real. That’s why a reflection is a “specular or virtual image.”
Specular.
An adjective used to describe symmetrical things, like an object and its double. Relating to mirrors. Or speculate, a verb meaning to make conjectures based on insufficient evidence, or to reflect on an exclusively theoretical plane. To reflect comes from reflection, as in thinking, or as in a visual representation, or that which is reflexive. All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches. Even this essay is becoming a reflection of the act of writing it, a Borgesian game of writing an essay about writing an essay, with the author at the center, multiplied in all the mirrors of her life at once, trying to figure out which is the real version.
This brings me back to mirage: “an illusory image.” I wonder if the word might have come into existence not because of the optical illusions visible on the highway, but as a reminder that the world of the mirror is a world of unreal images, images that can never serve as anchors. Every attempt we make to see ourselves has failed before the first glance.
*
I could begin in literature. Narcissus drowned in his own reflection. Medusa is petrified when she catches sight of herself. The witch in “Snow White” needs someone to confirm her beauty. The mirrors of Galadriel and Erised reveal people’s deepest desires. Alice travels to a parallel world. As a vampire, Dracula casts no reflection. Borges and Arredondo hate mirrors for their capacity to multiply. Ashbery writes his self-portrait in a convex mirror and Vilariño buys one for her bathroom. Rilke speaks to them directly, telling them no one has ever described their essence. Woolf believes people shouldn’t hang them in bedrooms. They appear in the horror stories of Poe and Hoffman; in the poems of Plath, Hardy, and Lorca; in works like Shakespeare’s Richard II. I could go on, but literature is so crammed full of mirror images and gazes that just a few are enough to create the feeling of an infinite mirror.
To say that “art is a mirror” is cliché. But what is it, if not Cortázar’s axolotl? Sometimes I forget that writing is my form of reflection. Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of this essay is just one piece of the full picture. The anecdotes and facts in my notes interweave, reference each other, form clusters. Though I cling to each individual idea on its own, I’m so close to them that I can’t see the picture they make up. I discern its outline as I write it.
To speak of mirrors and literature is to bite my own tail and return to the beginning.
*
I could begin with any one of these pages, and I would always arrive at the same point. Today. Before going out, I open my closet door. A shock of unfamiliarity runs through me. I take in the person wearing my clothes, my glasses, my shoes. Who is that?
