Curiosity 61: Mirrors

I am noodling on a piece (an essay) that has to do, in part, with mirrors. But I'm too lazy to figure out something coherent to say on that subject here, and searching for images of mirrors—going back to ca. 6000 BCE—was likewise daunting, though I can say that the earliest mirrors were no doubt made of obsidian (like the one pictured here, from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia), before polished bronze and other metals came along throughout Eurasia, ca. 2900–2000 BCE. 

The first, very small, convex glass mirrors were from the third century (or maybe earlier, but not a whole lot). The craft of plane glassblowing and silvering did not arise until the twelfth century, and then was taken to an artform in Venice. Mirrors became more common generally simply because of their fragility: if people (starting with the nobility) were to be able to regard their own countenances, the mirrors doing the reflecting had to be manufactured locally. Which made them more accessible. (The illustration here is from Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434.)

In any case, I didn't want to go into all that history. So here's a poem, by Sylvia Plath—for something completely different:

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.