After having closed out an extremely surreal year and as we try to build a new life in a new year with resolute, as we do in the first few weeks of every year, we start looking back, reflecting on our personal lives, our careers, our relationships, our patterns, and our choices. We look back on our happy moments with gratitude, weak moments with kindness toward ourselves, and throughout it all, we wonder and learn about ourselves. This week’s collection is about mirrors and the way it relates to our selves. Enjoy!
"When mirrors are facing each other there is a message of eternity, an infinite loop. That’s how I see the coexistence between human beings.”
“How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider yourself image erotic? Do you pretend that you’re a star’s child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization?”
— Wayne Koestenbaum, from My 1980s and Other Essays
“I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923
Helmut Schober, Glasstück and The Narcisistic Piece, 1978
— Haruki Murakami, from Killing Commendatore
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study for Joe (_2010980), 2017
“A reflection in a mirror is a perfect, depthless form, never as complex or shifting as the real body staring back at it. Sepuya chops up these reflections for us, refusing us neat or cohesive views. In his work, the mirror’s imperfection enables us to see the imperfections within ourselves, further refracted by our relationships with others.”
—Evan Moffitt
Friedl Kubelka, Pin-up, 1973
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
— Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own
“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”
— Jean Cocteau
Balthus, Nu devant un miroir, 1955
“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
— James Baldwin
Hilda Palafox
“Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?” ― Charles Yu, from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Anish Kapoor
Sylvia Plath, Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful ‚ The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Zanele Muholi, Bona, Charlottesville, 2015
“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face - there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very poster he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart”
— Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet
If you relate or disagree with a take above, hit reply and let me know!!
Very into this one love. 💕