A Brief History of Mirrors
Oh no, we're perceiving ourselves
“You know what’s great about today?” asked Narcissus, untethered from the angst and foibles of perceiving his own person.
“What’s so great?” said the townspeople, all at once.
Narcissus smiled so wide that his face was all gums and his eyes were swallowed up by his marshmallow cheeks. But he didn’t know, so he didn’t think about it.
“The rain is here, for the first time in my whole life, and stepping into the puddles is like treading on the heavens!”
Recalling the rain from the last waxing moon, nary a fortnight ago, the townspeople hid their pity behind small smiles and avoided eye contact. Narcissus was always doing this.
“Don’t you just love the rain?” he cried with joy.
Oh no, not again. Narcissus cast a wide net of smothering affection that would bind to anything in its reach.
A fish that had fallen off the cart. “Remarkable! A rare and divine delight! I must fetch a sprig of oregano from the garden for roasting!”
The throng of Trojans swaggers through town. “Tremendous show! How shiny! You all have something special about you!”
A trodden-over hat he would never wear. “A rare find, a keepsake fit for generations!”
Embarrassing.
But the draw of fresh water was calling to him louder than anything ever had, just as the fish, the invading army, the hat before it. He prepared to hoist himself into the rainwater-filled spring by removing his stockings but not his shoes, then pushing the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. They billowed and their corners dipped below the surface at the wrist anyway. Leaning over the edge, his reflection looked back at him, dizzying anticipation painted on his face.
Oh no, Cissy thought, my teeth glow with iridescence and my face looks like fresh cream! My eyes glimmer, holding the hopes of the world in them! I mustn’t forget this moment. I am about to have the most wondrous experience of my life. These crystal waters! Refreshment of the body and mind! My spirit ready to be revived in a single gasp of breath!
He remained perched there. Time passed around him. A day and a night, repeating.
The most wondrous experience of my life.
Finally, something he could love forever.
Hello, Amateurs! It’s been a while. I’ve been missing this little project while I’ve been back at school and working three to four jobs at any given moment. But here in this glorious August, between the end of the summer term and the beginning of the fall one, I’ve got the itch to return to some science-y sleuthing with you all!
For paid subscribers: I’ve kept billing paused. Let’s just have fun!
At one of my jobs, a science tutor with my college, I’m tasked with writing professional development self-reflection prompts for my colleagues. This week I asked them to hold a mirror up to themselves (metaphorically) to consider what parts of their tutoring practices they feel would or wouldn’t work for them as a learner. Because of who I am as a person and this being the last week of classes for the summer term (read: things are reaaaaaaally quiet), I decided to revisit some of the history and lore of the mirror in a few different cultures.
Things I didn’t know:
Modern mirrors are generally made of glass with an evaporated aluminium coating, though…
The traditional (c. 1835) method of applying a metallic silver backing to a pane of glass is still used, despite being a health risk1
But for literally millennia prior, societies around the world would still make mirrors out of reflective ores by extracting and polishing
copper (Mesopotamia, China),
pieces of iron-rich pyrite and hematite, obsidian, or gold (Mesoamerica),
bronze (Greece, Rome, China)
Mesoamerica and China in particular have thousands of years of culturally significant relationships to the mirror. They’re portals to contact the dead, portals to see the future, representations of self (specifically eyes or faces) and nature, and sources of protection.
I’ve felt inspired to explore the idea of mirrors, specifically the ways that we perceive ourselves and others; the slow-to-evolve lens of social constructions and cognitive biases painting the plain reflection. Thanks to an author and social psychologist I admire, Dr. Devon Price, the evolution of my own capacity to be non-judgmental of myself and others is growing. One of the biggest prizes that has come out of this idea for me is the amount of grace that has become accessible in response to my own thoughts and actions.
There are some universal human experiences that tie us together through space and time. Regret and embarrassment come to mind as two of the most memorable. Someone does something to elicit social consequences, and that transaction evolves into meaning, which is then folded into “how I am”. A therapist might say that an experience like this adds a “story” to the book of self; something we tell ourselves is true continues to be so until we dispel the idea or overwrite it with something new.
So when faced with the challenge of looking into our own eyes (literally or as a society), all of the social transactions we’ve accrued over time are laid in among our actual selves. I wrote the Narcissus bit as a joke, initially, but it ended on a pretty pointed note. To love ourselves completely is to see our thoughts and feelings in context, and to learn not to judge ourselves harshly for those things.
Dr. Price’s book, Laziness Does Not Exist, is a testament to this idea:
If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple. I’m so grateful to Kim[berly Longhofer] and their writing for making me aware of this fact. No psychology class, at any level, taught me that. But now that it is a lens that I have, I find myself applying it to all kinds of behaviors that are mistaken for signs of moral failure — and I’ve yet to find one that can’t be explained and empathized with.
Context matters when we make judgments of ourselves, too.
Can a new interpretation of something we see every day, like our reflection, be enough to change its meaning in our lives? Can we be curious with why and how we feel certain things about others, then allow ourselves to have grace for them? Is there a way to love ourselves in an unflinching, unbreakable way that transcends the regret-embarrassment-shame cycle?
For all the varied relationships we each have with our reflections, maybe we can find ways to love them forever.
Tarnish is one annoying thing to consider, as well as the risk of explosion. The process of adhering silver to glass involves combining silver nitrate and ammonia with formaldehyde. For those of us who are not chemists: silver nitrate + ammonia + formaldehyde = ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer and crude explosive with a hair trigger.
I stumbled on this. So glad you are writing and sharing again. I very much enjoy reading you. Also: “To love ourselves completely is [to]see our thoughts and feelings in context,”