What Mirrors Don’t Show Us: A Guest Post by Elise Stephens

I’d like to begin by making a claim:

Mirrors aren’t entirely honest.

That is, the information they reflect is incomplete. I’m not referring to inversion; experience teaches us that mirrors flip reality and send it back in a way that seems *almost* right until we try and fail to read the backward letters or follow the path in the maze. The dishonesty I’m talking about is the omitted details of psyche and personhood that a mirror can’t show and therefore can’t honestly report on.

A mirror’s reflection might show bags under the eyes, but it doesn’t tell how those bags were earned through a late-night conversation with a friend who needed a listening ear. The looking glass, to use a more archaic term, might reveal elegant cheekbones and a perfectly groomed five o’clock shadow, but leave out the cutthroat ambition lurking in the heart.

Magazines, billboards, advertisements, social media posts – all of these are choked with visuals. Just like a mirror’s reflection, they can’t tell the whole story. A mirror only delivers a flat report of my external appearance. It can’t express who I am or who I will become. It can’t reflect the state of my soul.

I’d like to think I have a fairly healthy self-image, and yet I check my mirror multiple times a day to ensure it’s still showing me and the world what I want to be shown.

If we were to somehow create or discover mirrors that showed what was writhing and trembling beneath the surface, I wonder if anyone would even want to stand in front of them anymore.

I imagine myself looking in one such mirror: I see my anxiety about my unfinished project and the gaping hole in my childcare routine, plus my worry about the persistent belly fat that might be the result of age or maybe not enough aerobic exercise or maybe it’s the antidepressants I started eighteen months ago.

Talk about being stripped proverbially naked in front of your hopes and fears.

If mirrors showed all of this, I think I’d probably take mine off the wall. Actually, I’d probably smash it. Superstition can jump in a lake.

This psychological type of mirror makes me think of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (This is good, creepy fiction, by the way. Read it for free here). A magical portrait depicts the deteriorating character of a wayward man while the man himself remains dashingly handsome by all outward appearances. Dorian Gray cuts his way through society and hurts a great many lives and, all the while, his magical portrait turns uglier and more frightening as it shifts to reflect his inner state. You might call the portrait a painted mirror.

This idea of paintings as mirrors that reflect the inner thoughts of their creators has deeply fascinated me. If a painter could somehow infuse her feelings into the pigment in such a way as to imbue the artwork with her sentiment, she would be making not just a mirror of herself, but a living composition that someone else could experience when they looked at it.

The magical art of lumastration—a craft that I dreamed up in which the painter selects feelings to place into the paint and carefully creates a visual and emotional landscape—plays a major role in my current fantasy novel. In my short story “War Painting” (available now in Gilded Glass: Twisted Myths and Shattered Fairy Tales), a frustrated young artist joins the war effort in hopes of making a name for himself by lumastrating paintings that will be used to psychologically destroy the enemy. It’s a peek into the dark side of ambition and its cost.

As part of this guest post, I’ll be giving away an ebook of my YA urban fantasy Forecast. Make a comment to be entered in the drawing!

In the meantime, take care around the mirrors in your life…

Elise

 

 

Elise Stephens’ storytelling is influenced in large part by a lifelong love of theater and a childhood of globetrotting. Much of her work focuses on themes of family, memory, and finding hope after a devastating loss. She is a first-place winner of Writers of the Future (2019). Her fiction has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Escape Pod, Writers of the Future Vol 35, and FIYAH, among others. Elise lives in Seattle with her family in a house with huge windows to supply the vast quantities of light she requires to stay happy. She is currently seeking representation on her next science fiction novel. www.EliseStephens.com