Mirror

The looking glass is invisible. It is only a plane without a visible surface. And so we always mistake it for reality until we see how everything inside it is reversed. We feel more than know if a mirror is nearby or in front of us.

We feel more than know when we are looking into one. We deduce it. Otherwise, we would not know it is there at all. A mirror was what Icarus felt more than saw.

How long has it been since he saw his body falling into the sea? He has no way of telling. Except by the number of planets he visited, the lives he watched from a distance, unseen, the stars that flew by him as he traveled through the universe looking for its end, the edge, that he thought would explain to him exactly the point of all these, the point of life, the point of him. Him, who is a story looking for a resolution, a proper end. And yet it seemed as if he had traveled the length of eternity itself without this edge coming into sight. Until he felt it.

And what he felt was something not dissimilar from falling into the sea. But it was not water that he fell into. He felt nothing like the impact of going into a fluid of a greater density. He felt only a sudden sense of passing through an invisible wall; where, in an instant, everything was not quite what it should be.

It took a bit of time before he saw it. He had to retrace his path backwards to see it again. And what he saw was a thin line in space that divided everything into two reversed realms. This line, though invisible, was his only proof that it was there at all. He could have missed it entirely. When he went beyond the line he could see a thin invisible surface running the length everything, the mirror plane itself reflecting the stars and the galaxies.

As a point on this line and plane he saw immediately the absolute symmetry of everything. What was on one side was exactly what was reversed on the other, the invisible mirror, the looking glass.

It was by this that he discovered the nature of his presence. He was neither matter nor light. He was as invisible in the mirror as the mirror itself was invisible to him. They existed, but not quite in the same sense as the stars and planets exist. He was not an image in the mirror. Like the mirror, he existed only in the same sense that ideas exist. They could be described, if one desired it, as a story or even a mathematical equation; but after that, nothing else. They existed, but only by virtue of the existence of other things.

They were manifestations. They were both invisible points along an infinite line in space, which if you moved through it becomes a single flat plane composed as it was of infinite points running outwards in a straight line into endless space. It all depends on how the viewer sees it, if the viewer sees it at all.

In his mind, he knew he had come to the edge of the universe itself. In ancient days, they thought the world was as flat as a table. If you travelled long enough and far enough you would inevitably fall into a monstrous death. It would be many years after the fall of Icarus before it was proven that the earth did not have this edge into which a man might fall. The edge was not there. And yet, humans still went searching for it, romancing the very idea of it, the coming and falling into the end of everything.

And now, there, in front of him, the edge itself. And it made him wonder if he should continue on in his journey. It did not take him long to decide. Every particle in space moves by inertia along its fixed course. To stop where you are is always more difficult than to continue. He wondered if staying where you are is at all possible both in the realm of physics and poetry. And so he moved on.

How long did it take before he came back here, returning only to where he had come from?

Once again, he saw Daedalus, his father, sadly looking down on him. Him, in the deep dark of sleep, falling into the sea. He saw how peaceful he looked. Etched on his face, the same archaic smile reminding him of faces on the statues of Praxiteles, the sculptor of ancient Greece, or Leonardo da Vinci’s La Giaconda, the Mona Lisa.

He could, if he wanted to, wake himself in time before the rushing sea came to claim him. But he felt only that tired, peaceful, emptiness one looks forward to at the end of every journey. He wondered whether he should.