Orpheus and Eurydice by De Freston Tom;Hargrave Kiran Millwood;Barton Max;

Author:De Freston, Tom;Hargrave, Kiran Millwood;Barton, Max;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Graphic-Poetic Exploration
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

The original mirrorball

Zata Banks1

I see them as infinite, elemental

Executors of an ancient pact,

Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers (1960)

Silence moves faster when it’s going backwards.

Jean Cocteau, Orphée (1950)

A mirror is a compelling invitation.

Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in the water and pines away. Perseus slays Medusa, whose direct gaze would turn one to stone, by looking at Medusa’s reflection in a mirror. Superstitions concerning mirrors include covering mirrors after a death (because the mirror can trap the soul of the departed), and that a broken mirror brings seven years of bad luck (because the soul regenerates after seven years). Mirrors have been used in magical and psychic circles to communicate with the dead, for remote-viewing of other locations, and it was believed that mirrors reflect the true soul of a person (so, for instance, vampires have no reflection).

Cocteau reflected elements of these myths in his work, for instance, in his play Orphée (1927) and in his Orphic Trilogy films: Le Sang d’un Poète (1930), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament d’Orphée (1959). In Le Sang d’un Poète, a female statue persuades the artist to pass through a mirror, and, upon returning, the artist smashes the statue; in Orphée (1950), in one scene Orpheus presses against a window (a transparent mirror), in another, he puts on a pair of gloves in order to penetrate a mirror; in Le Testament d’Orphée, Cocteau plays himself as a time-travelling poet, and all three films explore themes of love and death.

There is another, much more fundamental and primal experience of reflection: in the human eye, or, more specifically, in the dark centre of a human eyeball. Cicero wrote: ‘there is still much to be left to the expression of the eyes; for if the countenance is the image of the mind, the eyes are its interpreters’,2 and the organ of visual perception is in itself perhaps the original mirror.

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