I've been obsessed with mirrors all my life...my own reflection, the reflections of other people...mirrors and windows...how my face changes in them...where the light goes on its journey...how you can create darkening corridors into the fabric of space and time by
placing them in front of each other...how you could never see to the end of the corridor because you yourself were in the way of the path of the light...you'd have to walk down
the corridor, into the curved doorways extending to infinity, and who knew if you'd ever find your way back into the same world you left
...how a mirror pretends not to change you but does, how a mirror pretends to show you yourself when really it only shows you the empty heart of itself, a silver screen that gives you back flatness in exchange for your roundness, gives you an image instead of a life...so we begin to feel we are images on a screen...not spacious, emotional beings in a vast space of energy...the mirror tells you a lie...the mirror shows you the surface and tells you "This is you" and because we are living without wisdom there are so few people who will tell us "The mirror only shows you your skin and you aren't just skin"...
so we are supposed to pay attention to our skin, our image, our flatness, we are supposed to become "millionaires and movie stars" so that maybe our skin becomes so beautiful that everyone will want to look at it...instead of mirrors to show their own skin to them they'll be given screens to show someone else's skin, the images of someone else's life...not even their own flatness any more, so that maybe they could believe that they don't even exist any more, even that their own skin that the mirror shows them isn't pretty enough...no one will ever want to see it, touch it, love it...do you see yourself in the mirror and think I won't want to touch you?...but you're my mirror...you're my real mirror...
...we aren't a veneer, we aren't a surface, we aren't a screen, we can't be shown to ourselves on a mirror...we're spacious, open, full of energy and feeling, we are profound, we are old, we are alive with more life than you can see in the colour of our skin, we breathe and eat and fuck and laugh and we live by the feelings that well up in our hearts and our guts...
we're surrounded by electricity - you can feel it when you touch someone - we cannot be represented or understood or reduced...would you love me, would I love you, if all there was was the image on the monitor, the skin on the screen, the face lost forever on the cold ghostly surface of the mirror?
We love each other because of the depth, the space we can feel behind the other's eyes, the way you can feel that someone's heart hurts from the way they press their hand to their face...the way I'll know when you walk into the room...the way everything you do, your words and your voice, everything, gives the same feeling of you...we aren't a veneer, we aren't just skin...we aren't the shiny beautiful brown surface of an office table, varnished to look like mahogany but underneath just reconstituted wood, pale, sunless, dead...we ARE mahogany...we are alive...we are the same substance and identity through and through...
I can dance, or sing, or write you a poem, or run with you at night, or kiss you, or drink with you, and it's all me, because something animates me and breathes through me that is deep and spacious and loving and is to my skin what the sea is to the waves...it gives me shape...I give me shape...you give me shape...you're my mirror...in you I see myself as I am: "luminous undying and translucent"