Locked in Seeing: A Review of Facing the Mirror
How often do I look into a mirror or any other reflecting surface, dwell or glance? How often do I actually pass up an opportunity to check in with my reflection, however briefly and however imperfect the surface? And in writing, how often does the mirror come up as a handy and versatile prop or symbol, unexamined in its own right? Conversely, how often does it feature prominently? For the latter—in poetry alone—Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror,” John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Charles Simic’s “Mirrors at 4 a.m.” may come to mind; or how about Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal “Tonight,” the form itself resembling a mirror’s effects; and on and on, each poem adding its own facet to the mirror phenomenon. For the former, many of us may simply look at our own writing for a start.
Facing the Mirror: an essay by Katherine Indermaur (COAST│noCOAST Chapbook Series, 2021), 39 pgs., $12.00, paperback
Such omnipresence and the nearly universal fascination with reflecting surfaces make the mirror a vast subject area, and one hard to delineate. With its opening question, Indermaur’s Facing the Mirror announces its focus on the act of seeing and, by extension, on the subject who sees: “If I could only see more clearly my own seeing.”
In a meandering sequence of short passages, which include foregrounding the mirror as object, the essay demonstrates just how ingrained reflecting surfaces are not only in everyday living but in seeing itself, and the reader comes to wonder with the author “If I│I’d been born in a time before glass. Would I│I still be this. Would I│I still find fracture.” Recalling Fanny Howe’s statement in her poem “Outremer”: “I think the supernatural is all the more wonderful / when it is natural; it can be analyzed from so many angles,” this seeing is minutely examined, physically as well as conceptually—
To see our own eyes is to gaze straight at the lag rooted in the loop of light from mind to mirror and back.
Seeing cannot be isolated from thinking.
As readers we may feel tempted to imitate the author’s experiments in front of the mirror, for example, when she describes trying to blink fast enough to catch a glimpse of her eyes shut. I know I did. At the same time, the act of looking starts to lose its familiarity. It can no longer be ignored. The reader is suddenly confronted with their own looking and seeing. In this regard, the author’s introduction and consistent use of x│x, as in I│I, me│me, my│self, etc. becomes at once poignant illustration and signifier: the reflecting surface made visible as the fracturing medium, inescapably linking subject and reflection, and as intentional disruption of the flow of reading. X│X comes to mean reflection-making as process: I/eye-seeing-(an) I/eye-in-the-mirror as both verb and occurrence, the “eyetouch:”
A schism in speaking. I│I as riven as world
Fracture everything eyetouch.
Memory is I│I take my│my image with me│me every where I│I
Here, Paul Celan’s metaphor for where the poem resides makes an intriguing connection with the x│x signifier: “Infinite … the distance between one’s I and one’s You: from both sides, from both poles the bridge is built: in the middle, halfway, where the carrier pylon is expected, from above or from below, there is the place of the poem.”¹ Compare this quote with Indermaur’s own words in Facing the Mirror: “I│I make space / within my│self to / better see. The page, the frame is distance.”
Consequently, the x│x could be understood as the locus of fraught (self-)image-making—“[a] doubling that generates loss,” the loss of carefree unknowing (in part what Indermaur calls “childseeing”) and the birth of desire: “In looking, we│we know. We│we begin to burn.” And further, the x│x becomes the locus of doomed attempts at communicating with a self, each defeat intimate and tinged with shame:
A mirror’s honesty depends.
My│my desire, reflected, becomes shame. The mirror is my│my tool of disloyalty.
I│I am beside my // self, this mirror between.
At the heart of this desire is the desire to know, to reach beyond surface for clarity, the wish that seeing meant true knowledge—only to realize once more instead that perception is locked in itself and fickle. Implicitly, Facing the Mirror exposes time and time again how deeply vision dominates the sighted and the pitfalls of such reliance. Without sight reflecting surfaces wouldn’t hold any sway nor would the search for clarity be based on looking/seeing alone. The mirror is at once continuously seductive illusion and hard wall: the stare invariably bumping up against the surface/reflection, where “the song continues as silence” and “[t]he features of the face are a quiet infinity;” or to quote John Ashbery in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:” “The soul establishes itself. / But how far can it swim out through the eyes.”
As a natural phenomenon mirroring exists outside of human interaction, and whatever range into the supernatural it may take happens in contact with the imagination of someone who is sighted. How to describe such phenomena without constantly slipping into imagery, and at the same time, how not to resort to the tools of poetry in order to come anywhere close to a reproduction of sorts? Facing the Mirror weaves in and out along the seams of these questions in its multidimensional approach, drawing parallels with photography, specifically the effects of light, and the concept of surface itself, adding frequent forays into etymology, early European (cultural) history, myth, the sacred and the spiritual (of varying origins), anecdote, including the author’s own observations and experiences. Poetic devices such as similes and spacing are employed to great effect. Facing the Mirror, in some ways, pretend-plays to be a philosophical treatise with its many statements hinting at and suspending their own “theses.” With all its poetic showing without telling, it resembles a mirror reflecting back. In the context of playfulness, etymology, which relies on literality, opens unexpected tangents while at times mockingly undermining its own meaning-making. By seemingly random leaps of thought which create the sense of fragmentation and loose links, Facing the Mirror sends its readers along various trajectories, which keep circling back however. The resulting impression is akin to a star-shaped movement where each return ends in a slightly different place, like coming back to the same mirror but finding the reflection altered. Any reading mind, by innate necessity, seeks to reconnect fragments cut from the umbilical cord of their original context, regardless of the distances and according to its own tendencies. Context is tenuous but unavoidable, new connections are possible in its instability. Facing the Mirror is a fantastical mirror labyrinth. It turns the tables on looking and seeing. It not only represents in its form what it describes, but provides the experience itself—and hence, opportunities for discoveries. In this, too, it is very much like poetry: “Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities / multiply me at once under your spell tonight,” says Agha Shahid Ali’s speaker in the sixth couplet of his poem “Tonight.”
I may have started reading this hybrid chapbook with the hackneyed idea of the “humble” mirror with its haunting powers and unreliability, an unexamined tool for imagery in all kinds of situations, an object taken for granted. But, reading gradually produced the necessary estrangement from all these concepts. The question of power shifted and became nuanced. “If I could only see more clearly my own seeing” expanded to asking: how can I step out of my own seeing, what would that mean, what would it look like, and how is any such attempt worthwhile and why? How is my language a mirror and of what? Finally, maybe paradoxically so, Facing the Mirror is an instructive reminder that the world around me is not a mirror and not to treat it as one. The essay opens so many doors to its mirrored hallways and to the phenomenon that is the mirror, and there are countless more still to pass through.
Notes:
¹ Poetry, January 2017, From “Microliths,” Pierre Joris, translator.
Most poems quoted here can be found on https://poetryfoundation.org or in other places on the internet.
I also recommend Stephanie Burt’s essay on Agha Shahid Ali’s “Tonight:” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69597/agha-shahid-ali-tonight
Paul Celan’s translated excerpts can be read on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/91659/from-microliths