Here’s a question for you. When you reflect, where do you put the mirror?
This seems a silly question, and that’s because it is. But there’s also something here too, because having thought about reflection recently it occurred to me that reflecting on reflection itself isn’t without its value. And luckily, unlike when we put mirrors against mirrors in real life, creating a headache-inducing cascade of images (which I recently experienced at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern), we can stop our reflecting on reflection after only one reflective layer. But still, with its own repetitions, this paragraph shows how dangerous and disorientating such mirroring can be if we are not careful about it.
So. When we see our reflections in real life, we stand in front of a mirror. Alternatively, we turn on the camera on our phones, but I am too old for that already. Facing the mirror, our goal is to examine our physical appearance. Up close, in the mirror of a washroom or via our phone’s selfie camera, we get to investigate the blemishes, the little blotches and patches of colour, the wrinkles and the hairs. From further away, we check out our figure, or how the clothes sit on us. We might be taking advantage of a mirror on the inside of a cupboard to help us select an outfit.
In both cases, from close up or far away, we are seeing ourselves as an object in others’ eyes. We want to look good because when we look good we feel confident and happier. Even if we turn our backs on beauty products and fancy clothes, we certainly don’t want to look bad. This isn’t complicated. We use mirrors and physical reflection – the fake image of ourselves – to improve the real image of ourselves. Mirrors make the world more beautiful, if a little more narcissistic too.
This isn’t too interesting. What is, is when we reflect in a different way. Now, when you try and answer the ridiculous question I set at the beginning of the post, what did you come up with? I’ll tell you what I got. You place the mirrors right in front of your eyes. You look immediately back into yourself, without worrying about such silliness as what you are wearing. Here you are trying to descry the state of your soul.
Reflection in this sense is a matter of personal diagnostics. We are trying to work out our own selves. It’s connected to things like mindfulness. When we reflect, we try to understand our feelings and why we feel that way. We are trying to follow the wires and circuitry of our inner being, such that we might, with any luck, prevent ourselves from falling into bad moral and spiritual habits.
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Father Zosima, in the Brothers Karamazov.
Reflection is designed to stop just this. By understanding ourselves, we can uproot the lies that have gained purchase within us and prevent hypocrisy, that most fatal and inevitable of human weaknesses. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely it is that we will be able to deceive ourselves. If we spend enough time immersed in our hearts, we deprive the devils that live the chance of twisting them in unhealthy directions.
Yet is that all actually right? The first thing that you will have noticed when I suggested putting the mirrors right in front of one’s eyes is that this position completely obscures the light. Now, the soul is a murky place, but even so, doesn’t it need some light for us to actually see? What a hindrance the darkness is. Though we might be attempting to remove the rot from the floorboards, it is precisely the dark and the wet that the dark contains, which makes the rot exist, to begin with. We go into ourselves, find nothing, come out again and pat ourselves on the back, missing the obvious.
Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending deals with reflection as one of its central concerns. First, the narrator takes us on an introspective tour of his life, reaching one conclusion. Then, new information comes to light, and he does the same tour all over again, reaching a completely different conclusion. The process of reflection is the same both times. But what we see is that reflection of a certain sort can be an act of self-deceit. To continue the silly metaphor, how are things supposed to enter us if we have mirrors covering our eyes? Don’t we all cry out with despair every time Stevens fails to notice his life and his opportunities are slipping away in The Remains of the Day?
Introspection is a fairly useless thing when you put the mirrors in front of your eyes. Useless at its best, but often downright hostile. Turning our gaze inwards prevents us from noticing others or the world outside. These modern novels that are so deep within someone else’s head always bother me because they portray quite an unhealthy way of going through life. I confess I am probably more self-centred than most, but even I am more aware of the world and its inhabitants than the likes of Else in Schindler’s Fraulein Else. Of course, Else is not what we would call mentally O.K. But even the narrator in The Sense of an Ending is pretty bad at this. The deeper we go into ourselves, the less we seem to get out, and the less we act as members of the external community as well.
Who has not, on this score, found how utterly useless reflection is when dealing with depression? Thinking, reflecting, and ruminating, rather than actually using those CBT techniques to dismember one’s bad feelings, that is. When we reflect while depressed then it really is like we are in a hall of mirrors, because we only get dizzier and dizzier, and further and further away from what is real and meaningful.
One solution to ruminating depression that often works wonders is talking to others. Unburdening one’s soul is removing the feelings from the damp cellar I described earlier and shoving them into the light, where they are often quickly disinfected. Is there not a way of placing the mirrors that also does this?
Indeed, readers, I have determined that there is.
The optimal location for the mirrors when we are reflecting is right in front of us, just like when we are getting changed, but the mirrors in this case are also rather wide, so that we can see the world behind us instead of just ourselves and what we are wearing. When we reflect, we need to be able to place ourselves as a unit within a community. Reflecting when we only get deeper and deeper into ourselves fails to let us see how we fit into the narratives of others’ lives. Rather than binding us to others, reflecting in that sense divides us. Not so here, where we are obliged to see the connections between us all because we have to see others wandering about in the background, even as we focus on ourselves.
Does this mirror placement prevent hypocrisy or lies? Certainly not, but it also lets us see our actions as they are played out in the world, rather than only in our distorted memories. It becomes harder to hide from ourselves. Coupled with seeing ourselves as part of a network of human beings this mirror placement might make us a more responsible being too.
I was reflecting on reflection because I have been thinking about some of Adorno’s comments on fascism, namely how among those who fall victim to it their common characteristic is their inability to reflect. Reflection is obviously hugely important, but so is reflecting the right way, not just going into yourself and expecting that in itself to be enough to sort things out. Adorno, of course, understood that fact when he noted that working through the past is a process we must do every day, rather than simply do in one go and then move on. Here, however, I just wanted to have some fun thinking about what reflection might look like, and how we might want to visualise it.
We might go further and think about a form of reflection in which we ourselves are invisible (the mirror is placed alongside our eyes and takes in images from without). This we could equate to certain Buddhist teachings or else Schopenhauer’s own renunciation-orientated ideals of life. And there are things like music and literature and great art in general, all of which can also lead us to reflect in a way that removes our own egos from the equation.
But those are topics for another day.