The mirrors of countenance are potent beyond aesthetics, providing a reflection of the inner self. You can sense what the mind-behind-the-mirror makes of you. The accuracy of reflection is irrelevant. Whatever you approximate (they like who I am / they hate who I am) can have profound effects on the psyche, relieving the ego, or charring the heart with unbearable anxieties. Then the mirror starts talking. It seems the roles are reversed, but not exactly: I wonder what they think of me looking at them looking at me looking at them, what does my face say, what do they think I think of them? This is the plight of the mirror. It is wretched. It is embarrassing.

 

 

 

‘To gaze big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
is beneath all adult dignity.’

 

 

 

Consider True North by Sara Maitland, a short story set in a sparse and icy landscape, full of space, yet somehow claustrophobic. There are only three characters in the story, all nameless, an ‘old woman, a ‘young woman’, and a ‘young man’. In one scene, the old woman offers to braid the hair of the young woman, so she appears her ‘most beautiful’ for the young man who has won her heart. The young lovers plan to flee, abandoning the old woman and escaping the harsh environment of the tundra.

 

 

 

The old woman combs the lovely hair in preparation for braiding. The young woman tells her to hurry, ‘eager to see her beauty in the admiration of the young man’. This is a strange kind of mirror, the ‘admiration of the young man’. Apparently, one can see their own beauty in this mirror.

 

 

 

‘Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors, reminding them of how they look, or how they should look,’ notes Berger. But what if these mirrors were not glances, but interminable, admiring gazes? We might imagine the young woman of True North as a female Narcissus, staring not into a pool of water, but into the lovesick eyes of her admirer; so admiring, so in love, that Narcissus truly sees her own beautiful reflection in the countenance of another. The subject is hypnotised by the mirror, and the mirror is hypnotised by the subject, such is the beauty of Narcissus. The two of them stand there, eyeballs pressed together, till their skeletons collapse.

 

 

 

Here, in our myth, the witnesses witnessing each other become one intersubjective event. This merging of selves is a psychic process which acts in contradiction to the more brutal physical subsummations we see in nature, such as endosymbiosis, in which a lesser organism is overtaken and demoted, becoming but another organ of the devourer. Whereas, in the myth described, each observer is overtaken by the other, forming a new, non-hierarchical whole. But there was hierarchy in the beginning, a hierarchy of beauty, and a hierarchy of thought, as expressed by the lower order infatuation of the admirer: an infatuation for the other, as opposed to the infatuation for the self—through the other—performed by the female Narcissus. ‘Thought has always worked this way’, remarks Helen Cixous,

 

 

 

‘Through dual, hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior. Myths, legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organises what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean something? Is ‘the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought — all concepts, codes and values — to a binary system related to “the” couple, man/woman?’

 

 

 

It seems that these designations, including the designation of the ‘female Narcissus’, become less and less relevant the closer a coupling comes to total oneness, which is, it seems, a kind of death, as much as it is a kind of transformation. ‘The movement whereby each opposition is set up to make sense is the movement through which the couple is destroyed. A universal battlefield. Each time, a war is let loose. Death is always at work,’ Cixous asserts.

 

 

 

But these deaths are not reserved only for couples. Solitary selves are never truly solitary; we all experience internal events which possess the form of a rupture or redoubling, through which we can either witness our oneness with the world, or misapprehend our removal from it, becoming an audience within ourselves.

 

 

 

Consider The Luzhin Defense by Vladamir Nabokov. The title character, Luzhin ((i)lusion), is obsessed with the game of chess. The dissolution of his chess-self is the catalyst which brings about his psychotic break. Imagine if you were unable to witness anything at all — a football match, a UFO, love in the eyes of another — this is what becomes of Luzhin as finally he sees—what he sees—as the truth: his life is just another chess game in which he himself does not exist except as a ‘mover of pieces’, a conjecture seemingly confirmed by the last line of the novel: there was no Luzhin.

 

 

 

Was there ever a Luzhin? Perhaps we need to write another myth, a postscript, in which Luzhin exists in a purer ignorance of himself. Luzhin is dreaming. Looking down, he sees a pawn-shaped birthmark on his thigh, but it is not his thigh, it is the thigh of the dream-body he is forced to possess, an agglomeration of sizeless particles. But things are no different in waking reality. He is forced to possess a weird body there as well. He is forced to learn all the scattered languages of the body as if in some cursed, deontic ritual. What he needs is a face. He needs the blessing/curse of a face to envelop him. But we cannot see our faces, not without mirrors. . . and that is cheating.

 

 

 

And now we are alone, just as the old woman is soon to be alone. Thus, the old woman braids the lovely hair into a rope, and strangles the young woman to death, then skins the beautiful face and pastes it onto her own. This is a horror story.

 

 

 

The young man returns, lustful for his lover. He enters the dark tent and strips, revealing the outline of his muscled body. ‘He worked her like an old bull walrus and it was hot hard work’, writes Maitland. But as his sweat drips on her face, the skin suddenly shrivels, revealing the true face of the old woman underneath its fleshy mask. ‘Still naked, still lying on her, his lower body still replete with joy, the horror came into his eyes.’

 

 

 

A strange tale, a horror story. But is this really so unusual? Is it not the most universal fetish: the need to be seen as the other, to be the other, all with the ambition of mutual unconsciousness. But here, in the story, the fetish is radically actualised through the mechanisms of jealousy and solitude. The old woman is couple-less. Like the Narcissus from our myth, she sought self-fulfilment through the mirror of another, but, in the end, she is left alone, seen only by herself. . . superfluous. Hence, the old woman is doomed to the same lonely fate of the true Narcissus, the male Narcissus, of whom Denise Riley writes:

 

 

 

.    ‘Recoil
From the goal of self-knowledge! That maxim, chiselled in
temple
.    rock, gets erased
By the case of Narcissus who came to know himself to be
loved
.    water. Philosophy
Recommends a severe self-scrutiny to us, while a blithe self-
.    indifference is disgraced:
Yet for gorgeous Narcissus to know himself was sheer
torment, and
.    his catastrophe.’

 

 

 ____________

Michael Sutton is a poet and writer from Liverpool. His recent books include Unwelcome Combine (Paper View Books, 2024) and @BucciCoin (Trickhouse Press, 2023). He is currently based in Yorkshire where he researches and teaches at the University of Leeds.