The Mirror

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about mirrors, and this has led me to think about reflection. You might say that I’ve been reflecting. Most of us walk past a mirror every day, but rarely stop to think of their immense significance in our lives. In particular, how greatly they have empowered the existence of a physical presence. The concept of reflection was indeed born before the mirror itself became a recognised object, but it has since become the ubiquitous symbol of the notion of reflection. Think of something reflected back onto itself — you think mirror. And in terms of explaining my recent fascination with the mirror, I’d say its allure is pretty undoubtable. It has no colour, yet somehow it is also silver, and it allows us to see ourselves (though not really ourselves) and yet it is indeed us who are looking in the mirror. Intriguing, right from the off. And most importantly, the mirror provides us with the best way to perceive the very person we spend the entirety of our time with. Ourselves.

Unfortunately, I was not quite alive when the mirror was first debuted, though I have no doubt that I would have been rushing the metaphorical shelves to snag one for myself. In my eyes, the mirror is the first truly cool object to exist–BCE’s version of the telephone, radio and, of course, television. Its main purpose is obvious: we can see ourselves, know how we present to the world, and make any amendments should we see fit. But the mirror has affected our lives in far more ways than we imagine. In my view, to say Earth would be different sans mirror is a grave understatement. On the contrary, I believe our entire way of living would be totally unrecognisable. This is because, and stay with me here, our physical presentation is the most important factor in how the rest of the world interacts with us. Let me be clear, it is not the most important factor in how we choose to interact with the world, not by a long shot, but it is the most integral in determining how the rest of the world treats us. More important than our strength of character, our morality, sense of self, intelligence, humour, all of it. I know this may sound far-fetched, but if we break it all down it makes a lot of sense.

According to recent estimates, over 99% of the world is not blind. A small portion of that 99% have some sort of vision issues, but can still see with a level of efficacy. The number of blind people was of course higher thousands of years ago when medicine was at its most limited, but still, the majority of people have always been able to see. That means that for the vast majority of civilisation for the vast majority of time, all lived experiences have been coded by visual input, from birth to death. To speak on an individual scale, the only element of my life that is not in at least some way linked to vision is sleeping. I assume that the case may be the same for you too, in addition to perhaps a couple other things, such as meditation, or pin the tail on the donkey. Still, it’s not much. Every single other thing I have experienced has at least some visual information linked to it. One could argue that sleeping does too, as dreams generate a form of visual input, but we do not see it with our eyes and therefore it falls under a different umbrella. Physical presentation, therefore, is and has always been an essential and irremovable part of life, and it only makes sense that as human existence has progressed, so too has the complexity, versatility and meaning of physicality. For example, in ancient times a plate may have only been defined as a flat surface from which one can eat. The idea of having decorative plates, multi-coloured plates, different plates for different dishes, would have seemed absurd. Why? Because the physical currency had not yet advanced. People had not yet decided that some physical presentations are ‘better’ than others; that a plain, chipped plate does not hold as much value as an ornately decorated one, fresh out of a satin-lined box. They probably hadn’t even started to ponder the logic of why ornate things may be considered superior to plain things, as a way of demonstrating artistic skill and care. And I strongly doubt they would have been able to predict the presence of circular trends in physicality, in which we are currently witnessing something of a preference for plain things over ornate things, in the name of minimalism. Perhaps we feel a sense of unknowing nostalgia for a time in which nobody even knew what minimalism was. But back then, before technology and cars and everything we align with the modern world, all of this would have seemed frivolous. To live was to survive, and to think beyond that would have been wasteful of time and effort. Now that we’ve overcome the survival hurdle, though, and most of us are lucky enough not to have to worry about making it to the next day, the physical currency has become far more nuanced. 

Thinking of plate design, as riveting as it already is, also brings up the point of the interconnectedness of physicality. No object exists in a vacuum, and therefore the assumed value of something is affected by whatever it is related to. Think of the difference between a naked body and one adorned with designer clothes and jewellery. One of the bodies is noticeable for its absence, the other for its abundance. This can go even further, as we consider the type of body that wears the clothes, and who it belongs to. If a celebrity wears a particular garment, the likelihood is that that garment will rise in value. The next time the manufacturers put it out for sale, you can bet that the price will be at least a little higher. We can assume that the item itself hasn’t changed, its inherent value has remained constant, but its value through association, through connection, has been significantly altered. It was attached to a person of high social value, so now it is of high social value. The same applies to location. A painting on the wall of my primary school is probably worth less than what my parents paid for my uniform, but put that same painting in the Tate Modern? I don’t even know the word for how many times its value would multiply itself. Does the value deserve to multiply, though? Not really, not logically. The artwork is the same: made by the same person, taking the same time and materials to make it. But it does change, because, despite the fact that we may think of a painting existing just as a painting (not tethered to anything else, or where the painting is located) does completely affect how we view it. It, like everything, does not exist by itself. A bag of crisps in Harrods is not a bag of crisps in Morrisons, even before you’ve looked at the ingredients. My words are not Joan Didion’s or William Shakespeare’s, even before you’ve read them (and certainly after you’ve read them too). Through this initial exploration alone, we can see just how broadly physicality can be understood, and how it weaves its way into every aspect of our lives.

Let’s narrow our focus to personhood for a moment. Just like with the plates and the paintings, the various ways in which a human is presented affect how the world views them. This can be impacted by a wide variety of factors, including but not limited to gender, race, body shape, weight, height, hair colour, hair texture, hair quantity, hair length, skin texture, muscular definition, type of clothes, and much, much more. And as much as we may try to deny it, every single one of these things matters. They all have value and contribute to our personal physical value, as perceived by the rest of the world. Whether or not you get a job, get a date, get a friend, get a smile, get anything, is all somewhat determined by how you look. You cannot predict it entirely, but you can always be sure that the impact is there. If I attend an interview in my pyjamas, I can hedge a solid bet that I won’t get the job, but if I turn up appropriately dressed and the way I hold my hands, or blink, or open my mouth, slightly irks the interviewer, I still may not get the job, but this time neither I nor the interviewer will know why. When we add in those factors like gender, disability, race and age, the interpretation of the physical becomes even more clustered, and it seems almost ridiculous to suggest our appearance does not affect how we are treated. Every time we see another person we are faced with thousands of different physical cues, all connected to another, and we’re meant to just pretend that we don’t notice any of them?

Most of the time, though, we really don’t pay attention to the effect of the physical, at least on a conscious level, because we do our best to focus on verbal interactions. We have been socialised to judge others on what they have to say rather than how they look, and therefore encouraged to try to forget the physical. But still, it is always there. Sometimes, you notice that you are staring at someone before realising why indeed you are staring. Sometimes you move away from someone instinctually, and process why you moved afterwards. We do not always understand the reasoning behind all of our physical responses, given that there are multiple responses occurring at once and we only have one feeble brain, but they do all have a logic. Maybe the person had a very unique birthmark. Maybe the other person had a whiff of BO about them. Because we cannot remove the physical from anything, the physical is everything. Again, it doesn’t exist by itself, and I am not denying that what I say in that interview isn’t the most important factor in determining its outcome. However, the first impression is almost always based on appearance, and I cannot fight that whatever I do will always be accompanied by how I present myself. The two cannot be detached. 

So, what does this have to do with the mirror? Well, I cannot speak for the purpose of the mirror in early Mesopotamia, but I think we can all agree that in the modern-day world, the main use of the mirror is to look at ourselves. After all, most of us have our eyes to look at everything else. By the way, I would at this point like to acknowledge that most of this discussion is very much exclusive against those who are in fact blind. I apologise for this, and know that the physical experience from a blind perspective is a different and equally intriguing one, but that it is not my story to tell. Nonetheless, I am focussing less on vision as a physical capability, and more on what it represents in terms of social order and how we interact with others. 

To continue, we use mirrors to look at ourselves. When we look at ourselves, we are making a choice; a choice to look at ourselves as opposed to doing anything else. I am using the limited time the universe has allotted me not to make food, study, or speak to others, but to observe my reflection. Mostly, it is a rather unproductive action, and if we’re being a pernickety, only-24-hours-in-a-day kind of person, quite a waste of our time, but nonetheless, time is what it gets. And if you dedicate time to something, that means you deem it somewhat important, and worthy of your time. Not consciously, no, but subconscious value is relevant too. If I spend ten minutes playing with a fidget spinner, no part of me will think that those ten minutes were particularly well-spent, but I did still choose that fidget spinner over the countless other things I could have done, even with limited resources. I could have stared into space, slept, talked to myself, sang to myself…the list goes on. Whatever we do, we do for a reason, as flimsy as that reason may be. It tracks, therefore, that the more civilisation has collectively done something, like looking in the mirror, over the course of humanity, the more value that action has acquired. And if you count up the thousands of years that mirrors have been around, and the billions of people who have used them, I’d say that looking in the mirror has become a pretty valuable thing. Hours and hours of people choosing to look in the mirror as opposed to doing anything else. But by using the mirror and observing our appearance time and time again, not only have we awarded value to the mirror itself, but we have also more subtly afforded a great deal of value to the thing we see in the mirror: physicality. Looking in the mirror is not an isolated action. When you watch paint dry (not that you do, I’m sure you have a vibrant life) there are no side effects: the entire action is watching the drying effect of paint. However, with the act of looking in a mirror, you are not just staring at a shiny surface, you are also assessing the reflection of the shiny surface, and allowing it to affect your self-view. But the question persists: why does this make physical currency more valuable than the others?

It is easy to understand this if we imagine a commonplace situation: two people have been communicating on a dating app for months–they have shared intimate details about themselves, know where one another are from, their likes and dislikes, etc. However, they have not yet encountered one another in person, face to face. That means that, to most of us, it would be agreed that these two people have never ‘met’. It does not matter how much they have talked to each other or know about each other, we do not consider that they have truly met until they see each other in person. When spelled out like this, it can sound a little illogical. They know so much about each other, who cares if they haven’t seen each other face to face? But in our world of physical currency, you cannot know someone until you have encountered their physicality. Whatever information you acquire prior to the face-to-face meet has a built in ceiling: it can only go so far. Without the physical encounter, any relationship, whether it be romantic, friendly or professional, has a growth cap.

Similarly, think of the phrase ‘it’s nice to put a face to the name’. People who have had multiple conversations over the phone cannot consider their relationship officially started until they have met face to face. Because without a face, what even are we? Technically, meeting someone in person is our only bullet-proof confirmation that that person is definitely real. For all we know, if we message them online, they could just be an AI bot–nowadays there are even pretty convincing avatars you can have full oral conversations with. Physicality is the best proof we have of our own humanity, especially as it’s the only thing that AI hasn’t quite yet managed to replicate. Yes, we have the disturbing AI actress Tilly Norwood, who caused quite a stir in the film industry, but she still only exists on the screen. So then, maybe it makes sense that we value physicality so highly–it’s one of the few things left that is just ours, not yet usurped by the tech world. It’s our proof that we are us. Even so, this physicality-centred thinking explains a lot about why the aforementioned dating apps are still regarded with some hesitation; it feels instinctively wrong to meet someone online before in person, and people are often embarrassed to admit they have met on an app. Yes, part of this is that by being on a dating app one admits that they are looking for a relationship rather than just allowing it to fall into their lap, as the cool kids do, but it also reflects our reluctance to start a relationship with anyone that doesn’t involve a physical meeting right from the off. Beginning any relationship without physicality is to trust that the other person is real, without our best form of evidence to confirm it. It stands to reason that our entire understanding of what it means to think, speak, act, be… is inextricably tethered to a physical presence. 

I have been using the term ‘physical currency’ a lot thus far–it is, of course, an abstract rather than tangible notion, simply referring to what our physical presence holds in terms of social value. But it is also important to note that the very existence of the mirror complicates the physical currency. Because the physical currency does indeed exist without the mirror too: we would still have bodies, and still have a physical presentation even if the mirror didn’t exist. In fact, without the mirror, the physical currency would be a lot simpler. It would be based on undeniable facts: this is how you look, and this is what it means to everybody else. But the mirror, on the other hand, provides the reflection of what we look like, not what we actually look like. The notion of a reflection is more nuanced than what we assume it to be, this being a direct copy of what we see before us, shown back to us. Because, in actual fact, the very process of something being reflected changes its physical constitution. So it’s not a direct copy at all. This is most obvious in the fact that my physical presence is on one side of the mirror and not the other, and then in more subtle ways, such as the fact that my left hand looks like my right (mirrors reverse depth, which our brain interprets as an orientation change). Imagine you are looking in the mirror whilst standing next to a friend–if the friend started speaking to you, you would instinctively turn to look at their real, physical presence rather than continuing to look into the mirror. Because we know that what we see in the mirror isn’t real, and therefore it feels wrong to have a conversation with it. This conclusion may feel unproblematic, but if we agree that we never fully know what we look like, does it really make sense for the physical currency to be just so valuable? I have never and will never see what the mirror sees, what other people see, yet I am still expected to operate in a world where the most valuable currency is one I have never truly known? The importance of physicality, in spite of the mirror’s limitations, simply proves just how essential our social function is. Our appearance matters not because it is seen by us, but by others. It doesn’t matter that I cannot see myself, because other people can, and other people are everything. The currency lives on.

Unless, of course, it didn’t. Unless it never existed in the first place. Here, we have two different thought experiments: the first, a world without vision–no one knows what anything looks like, eyes are not a part of the face, or if they are they have a completely different function. The second: we still have eyes, we can still see, but there is no such thing as reflective surfaces. No mirrors. There is no way available to mankind to see oneself, and no one knows what their own face looks like beyond description and drawings from others. Let’s compare. In the first, does the physical currency vanish altogether? Well, not quite. Even if we cannot see, we can still feel. This means that naturally, over time, we would develop an advanced sense of touch, and probably create some sort of hierarchy of physicality depending on how something feels. The bigger the chair, the better, for example. This would then extend to people–there would probably be trends in physicality; maybe one decade prominent cheekbones would be in, and then the next a protruding chin all the rave. Yet, the physical currency would certainly not be dominant. It would have to become normal to develop a relationship with someone, learn from them, even love them without knowing, truly, what they looked like. Words, voice and personality would be the things we learn first, and physical currency would take a backseat. Doesn’t sound so awful, does it? This is because vision, in itself, is neither a good nor a bad thing. It’s just a thing. We are not scared of losing our eyesight because not having eyesight is bad, but rather because once you are accustomed to something, especially something as powerful as the physical currency, it’s quite hard to let go. But as I’ve just explained, a world with less of it has its advantages.

Next, the second hypothetical. Eyes work as normal, but there are no mirrors. Also water has a different sort of texture, so we can’t see our reflection in it either. What happens there? We can see everyone else, everything else, but not ourselves. Self-grooming becomes very limited, I suppose, makeup probably non-existent. If we don’t know what we look like ourselves, we have no metric from which to measure. Nobody can be prettier or uglier than us because we don’t really know what ‘us’ is. So, if anything, the currency of physicality weakens even more. Because at least without eyes we were all on the same playing field: we could all see exactly nothing. But without the mirror, it’s unbalanced–I can see you but you can’t see you, and we can all see him but he cannot see himself. Sure, we may still survey a room of faces and decide we prefer some over others, but without connecting these faces to our own starting point, the notion of any hierarchy becomes quite ambiguous. My guess is that the weight would begin to fall on clothes. A person’s presentation, and physical currency, would be dependent on how they deliberately choose to present themselves with garments that we can all see. I don’t know about you, but as a clothes-lover it sounds quite good to me. And more than that, it’s fair. We choose the clothes, but we cannot choose our natural appearance. 

All of this is to say that the mirror, though it may not like to hear it, is perhaps the earliest instigator of inequality. On the surface, it affords us equality, the ability to see ourselves like others do, but this is merely a veneer. In actuality, the mirror reveals itself to be one of the first objects to assign value to something that we can never truly access ourselves: what we look like. I hate to say it, but following the previous thought experiment, I hazard to suggest that the world would be better, and fairer, without it. So what do we do? Chuck them all in the bin? No, we’re too far gone for that. Besides, humans naturally love competition, and without the mirror, I’m sure clothes would turn into an even more obvious way to flaunt one’s wealth or eccentricity, and being ‘poorly dressed’ would become a dagger to social advancement. So yes, the mirror is powerful, and tricky, and dangerous, but we’re the ones who get drunk on it. We would always find another poison elsewhere.

Bibliography

  Ackland, Peter, et al. “World Blindness and Visual Impairment: Despite Many Successes, the Problem Is Growing.” Community Eye Health, vol. 30, no. 100, 2017, pp. 71–73.