Mirrors by Jorge Luis Borges
Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman Mirrors By Jorge Luis Borges I have been horrified before all mirrors not just before the impenetrable glass, the end and the beginning of that space, inhabited by nothing but reflections, but faced with specular water, mirroring the other blue within its bottomless sky, incised at times by the illusory flight of inverted birds, or troubled by a ripple, or face to face with the unspeaking surface of ghostly ebony whose very hardness reflects, as if within a dream, the whiteness of spectral marble or a spectral rose. Now, after so many troubling years of wandering beneath the wavering moon, I ask myself what accident of fortune handed to me this terror of all mirrors– mirrors of metal and the shrouded mirror of sheer mahogany which in the twilight of its uncertain red softens the face that watches and in turn is watched by it. I look on them as infinite, elemental fulfillers of a very ancient pact to multiply the world, as in the act of generation, sleepless and dangerous. They extenuate this vain and dubious world within the web of their own vertigo. Sometimes at evening they are clouded over by someone's breath, someone who is not dead. The glass is watching us. And if a mirror hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room, I am not alone. There's an other, a reflection which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show. Everything happens, nothing is remembered in those dimensioned cabinets of glass in which, like rabbits in fantastic stories, we read the lines of text from right to left. Claudius, king for an evening, king in a dream, did not know he was a dream until the day on which an actor mimed his felony with silent artifice, in a tableau. Strange, that there are dreams, that there are mirrors. Strange that the ordinary, worn-out ways of every day encompass the imagined and endless universe woven by reflections. God (I've begun to think) implants a promise in all that insubstantial architecture that makes light out of the impervious surface of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams. God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. Spanish; trans. Alastair Reid