Black Mirror

Jane Sloan

Photo by Author

Word Count 1143

When my siblings and I packed up our parents’ house in preparation for selling it to pay for their care, we unhooked no less than fourteen mirrors from the walls. My mother disliked looking in mirrors, just as she disliked having her photograph taken, but she delighted in the light that they catch and throw.

Before they became so terribly sick, I sometimes prowled their home with my camera. One of my favourite photographs is of the oval mirror in my father’s bedroom. Although he and I had a fractious relationship, when I look at this image I feel a tenderness close to love.

We are bewitched by mirrors. In Mirror Gazing, critic Warren Motte explores his fascination with scenes in literature where characters encounter mirrors. He calls this an obsession for he is so driven to collect such scenes—writing each up on an index card that is then tucked into the book from which it came, waiting to be retrieved when he’s finished—he estimates he has amassed no less than 10,000. He confesses: ‘When I stare into my mirror scenes, thinking about what I might do with them, I see only impossibility.’ But he cannot give up the habit.

Motte explores mirror gazing as narcissistic, as a form of self-contemplation, as a means of reassurance, as unavoidable, as misapprehension. Compiling mirror substitutes, he comes up with: windows, portraits, bodies of water, cutlery, sunglasses, eyes, burnished surfaces.

As far as I know, he doesn’t mention the black mirror, a specular stone made of obsidian that was believed to make invisible things visible. Though not always maleficent, it is often associated with the demonic, with divination. In The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, Arnaud Maillet writes: ‘The black mirror unsettles and disquiets. Shadow, primitive, enigma, debauchery, sorcery, necromancy, subversion, death—so many reasons for disquiet in the black mirror.’

After my parents died, I felt compelled to read the diaries and notebooks that have survived my tendencies to cull, discard, and disavow. What follows are some of the remnants from those pages.

*

Light so bright it curdles the whites of my eyes.

Ab oculis: without eyes.

I read Maggie Nelson’s Jane lying on my mother’s bed and watched Wanda in my father’s where the lamplight caught in the thick spiders’ webs spun high in the corner of the window.

I wrote: Is the window a mirror, reflecting obscurities, the unknowableness of others, ourselves?

Then I read:

We shall not wonder at rimed mirrors—

Windows give up their secrets,

Not mirrors.

— Laura Riding, ‘The City of Cold Women’

I skim certain sections of To the Lighthouse where Mr. Ramsay is the focal point, taking in a few words here and there, enough to make sense of what’s going on, but little more.

I won’t let him settle inside me.

He’s as finely drawn as the others with his little book with the shiny cover ‘mottled like a plover’s egg’, his gorgeous boots, his blindness to his wife’s world: her flowers and her perceptiveness he cannot see. His self-blindness. Thinking (or trying not to think) about him, I pace around, unsettled. Fugitive feelings.

Inhabiting a world without mirrors, I attended to small things: I watched butterflies and stroked the hairs on gooseberries before putting them in my mouth.

Seagulls flew overhead and little fish responded by breaking the surface, which dimpled as if splattered with bird shit. Mirror realms of sky and sea.

We dragged the stool over to the sink so I could reach the medicine cabinet—did I try to avoid my guilty expression reflected in the mirror? I handed my sister the bottle of cough medicine from which she took great gulps, then placed it back on the shelf.

The beginnings of something?

In Galileo’s ink-wash drawings of the moon seen through his telescope in 1610 the surface’s soft dimplings are further softened by shadows.

A dam is a round eye in the middle of a paddock.

To try to see through the blur and smear, find an order of knowing contingent on the frame, the determinants of time and place.

I remember being struck by the line in one of Sartre’s novels where the lover comments, as his girlfriend gets out of bed, on her rather short legs.

Years later, I buy an artwork that includes a photograph by Art Shay—taken from behind, through a doorway—of de Beauvoir standing naked, arranging her hair at a mirror above a sink.

Are the particulars always autobiographical?

I gave him a mirror. He fogged it with his breath, wrote his name on it then left.

We called it the time of windows. Yours blown out by a storm that swept across the reservoir to brunt and batter as you cowered, battened down and fearful, in the bedroom. The frenzy, brief and furious as misdirected anger. Now you have a clear view of the hills.

Mine, smeared and grimed. I complain that no amount of meths on newspaper removes the dirt.

Lucian Freud’s Woman Holding Bedrail (1997) brings to mind Walter Sickert: beds, armchairs, mirrors, windows. . . the secrets lived in interiors.

I cried so hard that the blood vessels in my right eye burst. Not realising, I walked home, all the while wondering why people were glancing at me then quickly turning away. When I eventually looked in a mirror, I realised I’d become the demon I so often felt myself to be.

The men on the train station were training two black Labradors to be seeing-eye dogs. They lead them, haltered and leashed, to the very edge of the platform where they gestured for them to move on. In a moment of synchronised beauty the dogs turned their heads, a gentle quarter-circle to the right, to avoid the sharp drop to the dirty gravel and metal-stink rails.

They moved gracefully, leading the pretend-blind away from where the world falls away.

A black-and-white TV was wheeled into a room and we were told to sit cross-legged on the linoleum floor to watch men land on the moon.

I tried to see but was distracted by my own reflection.

Through the window I notice the brief flutter of pigeons, a paper bag turning in the dust, a child squatting on the pavement inspecting the buckle of her sandals.

In this moment, the corners of life are folded in.

*

Mirror. Window. Light.

It’s the Danish painter Hammershoi who comes to mind: in many of his paintings a dark-haired woman, head bent, stands in a long, silent room where the light falls, slant and unaware, through tall windows. On the wall hangs a dark, oval mirror, the tain scratched and dulled by time. Were she to turn to look for her reflection, there would be little clarity in the seeing for the scratches and blotches, like forms of forgetting, occlude her sight.

—

Jane teaches high school, hoping that by catching them young she can inspire her students to enjoy writing imaginatively and riskily. She is a street photographer and has had short stories published in Australian literary journals. She also contributes to mETAphor, the English Teacher's Association magazine, mostly articles about craft and creativity, including 'Discursive Writing: How Not to Tame the Shaggy Beast', which explores the wildness of creative non-fiction.