White Hair and Mirrors
There we were again. We had been to a series of concerts — 5 in 4 days — sponsored by a local choral group featuring the music of the composer Arvo Part. After each concert, the organizers would put a photo or two of the performers and the sold-out crowd on their Face Book page. By some fluke of seating, my wife and I were in almost every photo of the crowd. I had gotten very good at picking out the back of our heads.
But this one was especially easy. I was the only person in the audience wearing a vivid blue shirt and in this photo a white-haired gentleman in a vivid blue shirt was standing next to my wife. I looked again.
“It must be the flash that makes my hair look so white.”
My wife looked at me with that pitying sort of look she gets when I’m especially clueless.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t remember any flash photography and no one else looks like there was a flash.”
“Is my hair really that white?”
“Yes.”
“When did that happen?!”
“About 3 years after your beard turned white.”
“My beard’s white too?!”
She looked me seriously and asked, “Do you ever look in a mirror?”
I started to respond and then stopped. Do I ever look in a mirror? I see mirrors all the time and I don’t like them. If you face a mirror and raise your right hand, the freaky person in the mirror raises their left hand. In my case, I have one brown eye and one green eye (I remember when it was still blue). The person in the mirror also has mismatched eyes — but on the wrong sides. It’s creepy. I realized that, in fact, I don’t look in mirrors. I sometimes look at mirrors and in museums or old homes I like looking at the mirrors with the wavy glass and the depth created by their silver backgrounds, but a modern mirror is just an annoying piece of glass.
“Well, no, I suppose I don’t really look in mirrors. But even if I did, how would I see the back of my head?” I smiled in triumph at this unanswerable logic.
My wife looked pityingly at me again, and said, “You just hold another mirror up behind your head and then you can see the back in the reflected mirror image.”
I grimaced. I’d been down that rabbit hole before. I always try to count how many reflections of reflections I can see before they fuzz out. And it’s strange the way that every other reflection is different. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I also don’t like those labels — I think the kitchen cleanser we have is one example — that have a picture of someone holding the same container — and on that littler container is a picture of the label with someone holding another even smaller container — etc. An endless recursive series of reflections or illustrations that make my brain hurt.
Ironically, one of Arvo Part’s most famous contemporary pieces is “Spiegel im Spiegel” — German for “Mirror in Mirror”. I like the music, but I don’t like seeing it even when it doesn’t feature a head of white hair.