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Narcissus didn’t fall in love with himself, but with his reflection. There’s a difference. “Inopem me copia fecit,” he laments. “Abundance has made me poor.” He wastes away with everything he wants right in front of him.
I have a primal fear of being photographed. Someone angles a phone camera at me, and I duck like they’ve pulled a gun. I’ve told people I don’t like having my picture taken, that it makes me anxious, that it’s painful, even. And still, they take photos. Even more violently, they show them to me. Navigating modern life while avoiding my reflection makes me feel insane. It’s easier to opt out of wheat than it is to opt out of seeing pictures of yourself. I’ve been called unreasonable. Totally neurotic. Maybe so. But I think I’m onto something.
Pull a medieval serf out of his thatched mud hut and plant him in our world; he’d be bewildered by how shiny and smooth it is. Flat. Liquid. Obsidian. A wilderness of mirrors. He’d not fail to notice, as he put one leather turnshoe ahead of another, that something was following him. Something in the form of a smear of color, slipping like quicksilver across the side of a building, warping across windows and screens before firming up in front of him, its eyes never leaving him. His reflection.
To be alive today is to keep the constant company of this trembling image-self. Alone in your bed, scrolling on your phone, the screen goes black between distractions and briefly reveals a ghastly face in the murky depths; your face, seen from an angle once reserved for long-suffering spouses. We see more of ourselves than any people before us. This ubiquity hasn’t brought us into a deeper understanding of ourselves. The opposite is true. It has alienated us from ourselves. It’s making us miserable.
Some locate the source of this misery in morality. In “people these days.” Shallowness. Self-obsession. Insecurity. Love yourself! Our scientists hem-hem. Our therapists coo… coo… But no one is totally sure how to articulate the situation we find ourselves in. No one, that is, except me, who is confident in saying: It’s black magic. It’s sorcery. We are under spells.
I’ll prove it.
We don’t think of our reflections as tricks of the light. We think of them, simply, as ourselves. This error is costing us dearly. We’re like the betta fish looking at itself in the mirror, driving itself to exhaustion by a mistaken understanding. At least the fish recognizes an enemy. We, on the other hand, enter into a one-sided romance. I submit a disturbing possibility: The fish is right. The images in the mirror are not us. They are Something Else.
We were once suspicious of reflective surfaces. We intuited them as portals, bewitched objects, and bringers of misfortune. These figures, though they resembled us, had an agenda. Scrying, the art of divining truths from mirrors, was for professionals—mages, oracles, shamans who wore spectacular hats and traded their sanity for supernatural knowledge. The average Joe was no more qualified to handle mirrors than the zoogoer is to enter the tiger enclosure with a bleeding hunk of meat.
Somewhere along the way, we dismissed all this as superstition. But stare long enough at your reflection, and it will eventually reveal itself to be a monster. Maybe I’m the crazy one. But when I look around, I see my neurosis everywhere. I see physical bodies piloted by their reflection. Toiling for it. Worrying over it. Feeding it. Obsessed.
Logically, we know we’re not literally our reflections. Turn the lights off. Your reflection goes away. You’re still here. But for the sake of argument, assume these beings in the mirror are even less us than we think. Assume they’re totally distinct entities. Give them a name. Call them Reflections.
Reflections aren’t confined to mirrors. A Reflection is anything outside ourselves that we perceive to represent us. Long before the proliferation of mirrors, which is a recent phenomenon, Reflections were mostly confined to bodies of water, and to the eyes of other people. Mirrors occur naturally, yes. So does fire. But the mirror of today beside the mirror of antiquity is a flamethrower beside an ember.
We “saw” ourselves in how people interacted with us, in how their treatment of us compared to their treatment of others. This is still true. I go to the club with my tall, conventionally attractive friend. He is offered a free drink, and I am not. I see myself without looking at myself. Comparison is the kingdom of the Reflections. Where they live.
In Medieval Europe, a person encountered their moral reflection by comparing themselves to exemplars; to Christ, to the saints. A man got the true measure of himself by identifying where he fell short. This basic dynamic also remains unchanged. When we look in the mirror, we compare the image to an ideal. This ideal can look like someone else entirely, or like an aspirational version of ourselves. In the past, however, a man stepped into this comparison expecting to fall short of Jesus and Augustine, and there was hardly shame in doing so. His baser jealousies, meanwhile, were confined to his immediate community.
Today, the exemplars are far more numerous, and more attainable. They’re just out of reach. Every day, we place ourselves in relation to countless strangers, most of whom we’ll never meet. Even still, no relationship is costless. Consciously or not, when we see an image of another person, we measure ourselves up to them. We establish a relationship, and give something of ourselves to it. Comparison.
The Reflections’ realm is expanding.
Mathematician, astronomer, and close advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee was an antiquarian with one of the largest libraries in all of England who abandoned academic wisdom in pursuit of supernatural knowledge. He came upon a looted Aztec relic, an obsidian mirror of the sort priests used to commune with Tezcatlipoca, “Smoky Mirror,” the harbinger of discord and Lord of Contradictions.
Together with his scryer, Edward Kelley, Dee used this mirror and other reflective objects to receive messages from what he believed to be angels. Kelley had a different opinion. He saw demons. He begged Dee to stop consulting the reflections.
Whatever Kelley saw, it touches on an intuition that presents itself across disparate cultures in time. Traditions from all over the world direct mourners to cover mirrors after a death. In Book IV of his Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex, "Six Books of Investigations into Magic," the most sweeping survey of the occult in early modern times, Martín del Rio filed mirrors under magia daemoniaca. Demon magic. Mirrors, he noted, relied on a pact with malevolent beings.
Mirror entities are never friends. They come to replace you. They're jealous of your depth, your aliveness, your blood. The vampire has no reflection, because it's bloodless. The mirror is uninterested in it. But Reflections' relationship with magic goes far beyond folk wisdom and literature. It goes all the way back to the beginning.
What is magic? The attempt to manipulate reality through signs. Today, because we have science, we scoff at the idea. But in fact, science comes from magic. La Cueva de las Manos, the Cave of the Hands, in Patagonia: Prehistoric man created a handprint on the wall, and saw himself in it. “Me.” Hand stencils are among the first manmade images, and some go back even further than those found in Patagonia. El Castillo. Sulawesi. Premature forays into abstract thought, and an abstracted self.
Sympathetic magic: the belief that an action, object, or ritual can influence a separate target through an invisible connection or shared resemblance. It’s unclear what the individuals who painted the animals in the caves at Lascaux believed, but the images look like sympathetic magic. We painted animals. Deer. Bison. These were depicted with remarkable observational fidelity, down to their seasonal coats. As for direct self-representation, we refused. But in Lascaux, hidden away in a narrow shaft, past hundreds of animals, you’ll find a single image of a man, with the head of a beast.
One of the first recorded depictions of ourselves wears a disguise.
When we separated sign and signified, we opened a portal. Through that aperture came algebra, ritual, geometry, liturgy, prose, science, and language itself. Symbols. The world was reflected back to us in a form we could freely manipulate. We were able to represent reality without reality being present. Signs eliminate chance and reveal necessity. This granted us insights into the secrets of the universe. The planet Neptune: discovered on a piece of paper before it was ever seen through a telescope. The gap between x in an equation, and what x stands in for. That is the realm of God.
Harnessing this power, we terraformed our environment, flattened it, removed it of friction, and, crucially, optimized it for the further proliferation of language. Language, like all technology, wants to spread. It behaves like a virus.
This came at a cost. When we opened the portal, it allowed for all manner of entities to slip into our world. Our brightest minds, invariably obsessed with science or religion or math, often went mad in the twilit gap between sign and signified. The essence of madness: I say that something is here, but it can’t be seen. Spend too long in this tenebrous Between, and you might end up like Blaise Pascal, the mathematical genius who had a vision of holy fire so overwhelming he sewed a written account of it into his jacket and spent the rest of his life championing Jansenism, an offshoot of Catholicism that held Catholicism wasn’t self-abasing enough. “FIRE,” he wrote on the parchment in a manic scrawl.
Following this joyful revelation, and after reaching the subsequent conclusions that he had no free will and mankind was lower than worms, Pascal started committing all his thoughts to paper in a sort of analogue Twitter feed. This ultimately took the form of his Pensées, where his famous wager can be found. There’s something about language, God, and symbols that invites self-effacement and, paradoxically, self-contemplation. Reflection. Speculation. These words belong to the mirror. All words do. Language is a mirror. Glamour, the old word for a spell, is a corruption of grammar.
It’s no coincidence that when mirrors became widely available, new forms of art and literature flowered that focused on the deep, interior self. We call these forms “modern.” The form of the modern essay, championed by Michel de Montaigne, who wrote so colorfully of his own mustache. Mirrors were key collaborators on modernity itself. Perhaps if vikings had access to pocket mirrors, we’d have a wealth of personal essays with titles like “On Performative Raiding.”
Mirrors invite a fascination with the self. To hate yourself or to love yourself is nonetheless to be fascinated. To be gripped. This was Ovid’s basic intuition in the tale of Narcissus. Why would Reflections want us to be fascinated with ourselves? Because they only exist while we’re looking at ourselves.
A Reflection is a contingent being. A symbol. A sign. It represents us. It is not us. The gap between us teems with demons. Daimones. Sentiments, emotions, ideas that seek to possess us. Every encounter with a Reflection opens a gap. Contemporary life isn’t just reflective because it’s shiny. We consider it entirely normal to endlessly contemplate ourselves. To be obsessed with ourselves.
Obsession. Its roots denote a siege by demons. Have you ever been obsessed? It does feel like fighting an invisible war. Obsession is the battering ram at the gate, threatening total possession. Once the demons break in, we cease to fully inhabit ourselves. We are disrupted. Distorted. Warped.
Two mirrors facing each other reveal an infinite regress.
Alienation is the particular misery attending modernity.
What is an alienated person? A person whose true self is outside himself. Estranged. Alienated labor: our toil enriches someone we’ve never seen, in a system we poorly understand. We intuit this arrangement as undignified. The indignity arrives to us as felt humiliation, as the suspicion that there’s something inauthentic about our lives. Disconnected, we reach in blind pursuit of ourselves, groping at unity. This anxiety is exploitable. We become susceptible, in this state, to the delirious notion that a pair of baggy jeans or a jar of goo will reconnect us to an authentic self.
The image-self, the Reflection, thrives in this environment. It is, in a sense, the avatar of alienation. Most of the products marketed to us have the Reflections in mind. They are image-first. Advertisements invite us to project the image of ourselves into the world they present. This isn’t exclusive to corporate advertising. An image of a stranger whose body we envy, positioned in a lush, faraway corner of the world: what does this image have to do with us? Nothing, without Comparison. In Comparison, we see something we don’t have, and that we want. The image becomes relevant to us. A Reflection.
We seek ourselves desperately in every available surface. Why does alienation generate such misery? Because we naturally seek harmony. We like evenness. I recognize this in my own compulsions, ones I’ve nursed since I was a child: always taking an even number of steps toward an arbitrary endpoint, always applying an equivalent sensation to my right side if one occurred on my left. We prize harmony in other people’s faces, and in our own. We find it pleasing to look at. Harmony says something comforting about the universe. It tells us there’s a benevolent design.
When we perform a labor, it pleases us to see the results of that labor. When we need something, it satisfies us to have that need met. Anything else is injustice. Unevenness.
Unevenness creates discord. Discord creates obsession. Obsession is the persistent and often irrational behavior toward an imagined harmony. As with religion, we seek unity through subtraction of the self. Pascal. Obsession is self-destructive. It whittles a person down to a nub. The child cutting a piece of paper into the shape of a heart, obsessively trying to make it perfectly even, will reduce the heart to a misshapen nothing.
We don’t like when one image competes with another. One either has to usurp and banish the other, or the two must agree.1 Thus, a hierarchy, an organized system, is established and reified. Unfortunately for us, we are confronted with hundreds of competing images of ourselves, thousands, each one telling us something slightly different. Chaos. Conflict. Tezcatlipoca.
Visual drift. Perhaps you’ve encountered someone under the thrall of their Reflection. Convinced of their inadequacy, they strive to meet the impossible demands issued by the mirror. They may even become a grotesque to everyone but themselves. Some will commit themselves to the relative safety of an aesthetic extreme, in a radical bid for agency. But the goalposts always move, because a Reflection is the moving of the goalposts. We can no more unite with it than we can unite with the letter A. It is a symbol. A discordant entity can’t achieve harmony.
This is the hell of obsession. The desired harmony doesn’t exist, no matter how painfully one strives for it. Carl Jung, speaking on alcoholism, called the compulsion to drink a low-level spiritual thirst for wholeness, for union with God. Spiritus contra spiritum, he wrote in a letter. Spirit against spirit. Liquor against soul. Addiction, like obsession: compulsive reaching toward union. Hence the sex addict who obsessively seeks out beautiful men is really seeking himself in their mouths; hoping to find a flattering image of himself to incorporate into his being. He seeks harmony with a more ideal representation of himself. But there’s always an even more ideal representation to be found.
What we call body dysmorphia: the involuntary fixation on a perceived flaw, accompanied by obsessive rituals, in a desperate attempt to find the good image that will overcome the bad one, ending the latter’s oppressive regime once and for all, and finally bringing peace. This isn’t mere vanity. The condition has high suicide rates. One study has them twice as high as that of severe major depression.
Harmony. When I was anorexic in high school, I found comfort in simple cause and effect, in the symmetry between skipping meals and my body’s response. It was validating when it provoked a reaction from the world around me. Are you okay? Are you sick? Confirmation that my rituals were producing an effect. I relished being seen as sick, because the sickness was my invention. My will. I ran so much around my parents’ house that I burnt a dirt track in the grass. Hunger pierced the insides of my bones to suck nutrients from the marrow. I was wasting away. I thought these were positive developments.
Obsession isn’t always obviously miserable. There are people who present as the very image of self-confidence, who make their living off their exceptional looks, who may even be fully convinced of their own beauty, and who are nonetheless caught in the snare, in the flat, shallow romance of glass, toiling for a being other than themselves. Authenticity becomes impossible. We are surrounded by images of ourselves. We’ve never been less satisfied with ourselves.
Abundance has made us poor.
“Iste ego sum,” Narcissus says to his beloved reflection. “That person is me.”
The most fortunate reaction to a mirror, in both man and beast, it seems, is indifference. Knowledge doesn’t do much. Narcissus was aware he was looking at an image of himself. Knowledge did nothing to save him. Those who’ve suffered from obsessive behavior understand this. One can easily identify one’s behavior as totally irrational, and remain powerless to stop it.
We’ve all seen the elaborate scaffolding required to produce a pleasant image. Lighting, tripods, makeup. Today, such images don’t even need a relationship with physical reality at all. Language. Mirrors. Technology. As they continue to develop, representations of ourselves become more abstract. We’re regularly given new tools to manipulate them. We can send them out into the world, fully knowing they are distorted. We still declare them to be ourselves, believing we authored them, and not the other way around. LLMs represent a new advancement: the first mirror for the interior. Soon, people will be able to speak to, and fall in love with, themselves, without having to recognize themselves.
Clever grammar! What are you turning us into?
In Ovid’s tale, it’s no god that transforms Narcissus into a flower. In some tellings, he takes his own life in anguish. But in Ovid’s, his physical body simply vanishes. The flower remains, bent permanently over the water’s surface. The flower. Beautiful, and unthinking. It almost sounds like a happy ending. Except that the Styx, as Ovid tells us, is still enough to gaze upon.
No photographs, please.
Hence mogging…
"Convinced of their inadequacy, they strive to meet the impossible demands issued by the mirror. They may even become a grotesque to everyone but themselves. Some will commit themselves to the relative safety of an aesthetic extreme, in a radical bid for agency. But the goalposts always move, because a Reflection is the moving of the goalposts." This piece made me tear up! Recently body dysmorphia was so bad I recently saw an injector and just asked them to "make it so I wasn't ugly anymore" and it's only been occurring to me recently that the ugliness is a feeling rather than a concrete thing with a quick fix. You write about BDD so beautifully.
Brilliant, as always. I wonder whether you knew as you wrote this that Mary Beard recently talked on her podcast about the modern ubiquity of our reflections—she mentions in particular the amount of time spent having to see oneself on a Zoom call screen, (harrowing!) how we're more familiar with the landscape of our faces than any prior generation. Yet it remains the case that delusion reigns supreme. Your insight about LLMs as the next level of this, essentially, hallucinatory worldview -- a "mirror for the interior", is as apt as it is worrying to think about. I wonder, too, how your thinking on this topic informs your work as an artist. Terrific essay!