Mirrors

Mirrors are tricky. In Japan, they were considered potent symbols of power, revered as sacred objects representing the gods, with intricate designs on the back displaying auspicious motifs like the crane. An uncovered mirror was considered bad luck. The mirrors I have the most trouble with are the ones on our car. The rearview mirror especially. Objects always look larger. So when I park the car and it looks like my rear is about to collide with the back of the building, I discover that the car is still four feet distant from the wall. This makes parallel parking truly perilous and awkward. Like the time I backed with extreme slowness and touched – touched – the front end of the Tesla behind me the woman sitting behind the wheel got out with her smartphone to take a picture of the anticipated damage. There was no damage. “I didn’t hit you,” I insisted. “Yes, you did,” she insisted. Do you see what I mean? Mirrors are up to no good.

In Cocteau’s Orpheus, the mirror is a gateway to the underworld. Orpheus is able to enter the mirror and pass through to the underworld by the power of magic invested in a pair of rubber gloves. They look like dishwashing gloves, though perhaps a bit shinier. He doesn’t struggle to get them on. They nearly leap onto his hands, as though they were alive. Orpheus hesitates, then – encouraged by Heurtebise, chauffeur to Death, played with elegant charm by Maria Casares – he puts his hands forward and enters the mirror whose surface shimmers like water. I’ve known for a long time that dishwashing gloves had magical powers. My first real job, age 15, was as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. This was my baptism to poetry. As soon as I got those gloves on, nothing could stop me. I could go anywhere. The underworld became a second home.

One of the most charged scenes in Shakespeare’s Richard II is when the newly dethroned King Richard is brought before Bolingbrook to humiliatingly relinquish the crown and read a chronicle of his malefactions. He has been stripped of his identity. He asks for a mirror. A mirror is brought forth. Richard gazes into it and asks “was this the face that every day under his household roof did keep then thousand men? Was this the face that, like the sun, did make beholders wink? Was this the face that faced so many follies, and was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke? A Brittle glory shineth in this face: as brittle as the glory is the face,” and smashes the mirror on the floor, “cracked in a hundred shivers.” I know that feeling. It’s hard, like glass, and goes nowhere. It stays fixed to the wall, while life occurs elsewhere, in a mirror of words.

Crossing paths with an old friend or friend whom one has not seen for ages means proceeding on both sides to an operation of facial recognition like those witnesses who must identify, behind one-way glass, the perpetrator of an attack. This is fate, said Hegel: oneself in the form of another. So writes French philosopher Pascal Bruckner of this peculiar form of mirroring one another. Aging is such a subtle, incremental process occurring over a period of years that we get a shock of recognition when such an event occurs. Why is it I don’t see this in a mirror? I can in a photograph. Years ago, a woman was quitting the mailroom in which I worked. She went around taking everyone’s photograph, ostensibly for sentimental reasons. When the photos were developed (this precedes the Age of the Smartphone), they were laid out on a table. I looked everywhere for my picture and couldn’t find it. Everyone insisted I was there. I kept looking. And then I saw it: that old guy sorting letters was me. How did I not see this in the mirror? Is glass more benign than silver bromide? This is what a mirror does: it flips the face into a perspective more flattering to our acknowledged progress through the ravages of time. Also, the lens can distort certain features, à la Pablo Picasso. And because cameras don’t show the 3-D version of you, you get the ruin of the face, not the stunned youth smiling out of the rubble.

Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror. Wrote Jack Spicer. So go. Stand there a moment. Take a look at yourself. The mirror does the rest. Here you are, my friend. The reflection of you. You in reflection. I have made a weather vane of your face, says the mirror. One day is gloomy and introspective, the next day there’s a dense fog and an occluded front crashing around in the head, a wind is rustling in the ivy and your eyebrows are raining. Lightning shoots from your eyes and cracks the glass. All because of a pimple. But that’s ok. The second law of reflection states that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Every incident has an angle. Lawyers are adept at this. A good lawyer studies a case from all angles. Find an angle, find an angel. Find an angel, find a face.