Mirrors

“Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things” 
- Gilles Deleuze

Identity, personality, self-interest

is mirrored in a fragment of a whole.

Crystallised by deposited aluminium

backed up with glass, universal reflection.

Polished obsidian, copper & bronze

as the finer elements have not revealed themselves.

Then reflecting an aristocratic aura

foldings of containment, the mirror polishes expression,

now a method of capture and containment.

The eyes flicker at the movement of an unknown self

excluded from the overall development.

The mirror polishes the lie; a trick mirror,

in which the identity is cultivated aside,

the lie is offered that an image is a reality.

And so, watching the image, the nobles

garden and tend to these separate selves,

watching the stability of their imagination emerge,

seeing that the image does not change, adding to it finesse.

Cultivating aspects of difference in isolation.

The mirror is an opening of the possibilities of self

but it also denies the realisation of connection outside.

The mirror reflects, but also contains,

and the emerging self-control by steadily watching oneself,

is a self-cultivated illusion shone in rich obsidian,

in the bronzed statues of wealth which stands apart.

And the Sphinx is a mystery because it is distinct,

and the expression narrowed in on itself.

Cleopatra's beauty a mystery because of a certain distance.

The power of a gaze upon oneself through a mirror,

is enough to shatter connection with the visceral.

Ages pass and the mirror maintains its ability to separate

to create identity which is only apparent within the mirror.

Only does this identity grow with a certain time,

as the outside world without mirror image.
Revealing, or containing?
This is the pestilence of the mirror: it frames consciousness.

Folds of personality unvoiced inside that mirror
the personality withheld inside a self that is unknown.
Communication of these folded meanings
impossible now as the mirror is a tragic constant.
The world is in flux whilst the mirror appears endless,
tragedy within that frame,
like a tragic novel or a poem with borders.

Photography, moving images, tend a high focus on another self. 
But this is equally containment if borders seem contained,
if the depth of that image is unseen.
So the mirror is a path into the unexpressed,
but also a trick of identity and separation. 
To recognise this shattering of connection
the mirror must not be broken but vocalised.
Not by finesse but disclosed through symbols hidden forms.

These forms and meanings held so clear in a symbol of expression
but only in our own eyes, must not be projected outwards
too keenly, the lover weeps for this isolation.
Wherein everything new is incommunicable in language,
and music, art, the capture of a new hidden meaning
not always a means of overcoming that tragic,
interior longing for a seized, prolonged moment.

Eyes are mirrors themselves, though they also express.
The words that cannot be vocalised can be inferred from a glance,
or a communication through the gaze.
That somewhat indifferent projection of self,
that search for connection yet not discovering.
And the eyes of another are a threshold of self;
gaze not as though they were a mirror or containment,
but a release.

The mirror reflection is a broken image of self;
it is inconsolably cryptic and self-containing,
limiting the doors of perception and an escape
from uncommunicable panic and trauma. A child learns
to place himself within that always abstracted understanding of self,
which cannot be shared. But is it not simply a leaning
into the water, a leaning into that perceived flux
whilst maintaining that it remains constant.
While all the perceived particles shudder and change.

It is a finding of self, but is that self, after all, alone?