Reflection

Reflection

I was reflecting the other day. It's one of those phrases we say without thinking, like it's nothing. But what was I actually doing? Looking back? Yes. Turning something over, and coming back to it? And the odd thing is that whatever I came back to wasn't quite what I'd left. It had changed on the way. Which made me think of Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Perhaps because I’ve been thinking about reflection.

I’ve made three works called Narcissus myself , a drawing and two sculptures. So perhaps I’ve been thinking about looking for longer than I realised.

Not a mirror particularly, but the word itself. What does it mean to reflect?

To look back. To think about something. To reconsider. To turn something over in your mind. But for me, reflection also seems to move forwards. We return to something, but when it comes back to us it is rarely quite the same. Perhaps that is what reflection is, something going out and coming back changed.

So, I was thinking about looking. What does it mean to really look?

We look at things all the time, but perhaps there is a difference between looking and seeing. To look for longer is to notice things. To question what we see. Perhaps, eventually, looking becomes thought.

And this has made me think differently about Narcissus.

We usually think of Narcissus as a warning about vanity. He sees his own beautiful reflection and falls in love with himself.

But what if it isn’t quite that simple?

Perhaps he isn’t simply in love with his physical beauty. Perhaps he has fallen in love with the idea of himself. With the possibility of knowing himself. Of understanding what he sees.

Perhaps the interesting thing isn’t that he looks at himself. Perhaps it is that he looks, and keeps looking. I find myself doing something similar when I’m thinking something through. I put an idea outside myself, sometimes in conversation with another person, sometimes in writing, sometimes here, and something comes back.

I look at it again. I question it. I change it. Then something else might occur to me.

Perhaps this is why we often sound out ideas. A colleague can reflect something back to us. A friend can. A book can. An artwork can. We put something out into the world and it comes back to us differently.

It isn’t quite a mirror.

It is more like a conversation. And perhaps this is why I’ve been thinking about AI.

Not because AI is necessarily the subject, but because it has made this process of reflection strangely visible. I can put a thought outside myself and something comes back almost immediately. I can question the response and send the thought back again. "(Echo couldn't do this. She could only give back what she was given.)" 

But it does become a kind of loop.

And yet this isn’t new. We have always made things that extend ourselves. We make tools to see further, travel further, calculate faster, understand more.

Perhaps that is part of what it means to be human, this constant desire to go beyond what we already know.

Which brings me back to the old warnings. Narcissus looking too long. Icarus flying too high. The stories seem to keep telling us to be careful with our own curiosity, our ambition, our desire to go further.

He will live long, said Tiresias, if he does not come to know himself. 

But should we be careful? Or is the desire to go further precisely what has brought us here? Perhaps the problem isn’t reflection itself. Perhaps reflection becomes a problem when nothing new can come back from it.

When it becomes a closed loop.

When we are no longer in conversation with the world, but only with ourselves.

I have been thinking about this for rather too long, and perhaps, like Narcissus, I have simply gazed too long.

But perhaps that is what reflection asks us to do.

To look again.

And then to wonder what it is we are seeing.

References

• Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting (De pictura, 1435). Book 2, where Narcissus is named as the inventor of painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson, Penguin Classics, 1991.

• Bartsch, Shadi. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Discusses Narcissus and the mirror as a route to both self-knowledge and self-delusion.

• Caravaggio (attributed). Narcissus, c. 1597–99. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

• Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book 3, lines 339–510 (Echo and Narcissus, including Tiresias's prophecy, "si se non noverit"). Translated by A. D. Melville, Oxford World's Classics, 1986.

• Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book 8, lines 183–235 (Icarus).

• Vinge, Louise. The Narcissus Theme in European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century. Lund: Gleerups, 1967. The standard survey of how the myth has been read.

• Oxford English Dictionary, "reflect, v." From Latin reflectere, "to bend back".