In the Preface to his fifth book of poetry—In Praise of Darkness—Borges writes: “To the mirrors, mazes, and swords which my resigned reader already foresees, two new themes have been added: old age and ethics.”¹ Mirrors are a constant in Borges' poetry, but long before becoming a major theme or motif in his works, mirrors had been for Borges an obsession that goes back to his childhood years. To his friends he has told that as a child he feared that the images reflected on his bedroom mirror would stay there even after darkness had effaced them. For the boy, the images inhabiting mirrors were like the ghosts haunting the castle of a gothic novel—constantly lurking and threatening through ominous darkness.

In the brief piece entitled “The Draped Mirrors” from Dreamtigers he reminisces upon those fears: “As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality. Their infallible and continuous functioning, their pursuit of my actions, their cosmic pantomime, were uncanny then, whenever it began to grow dark. One of my persistent prayers to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream about mirrors. I know I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities” (Dreamtigers; [hereafter referred to as DT, 27).

One of the earliest references to mirrors appears in the essay “After the Images” originally published in the journal Proa in 1924 and later included in his first book of essays, Inquisiciones; hereafter referred to as I(1925). There he says: “It is no longer enough to say, as most poets have, that mirrors look like water … We must overcome such games … There ought to be shown a person entering into the crystal and continuing in his illusory country, feeling the shame of not being but a simulacrum that night obliterates and daylight permits” (I, 29). This first use of mirrors as the country of simulacra appears also in his first poems. “La Recoleta,” from Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923), opens with a series of images in which mirrors are just a simile, the vehicle of a comparison which is repeated with the frequency of a linguistic tic. In that poem he says that when “the soul goes out.”

Space, time and death also go out,
As when light is no more,
And the simulacrum of mirrors fade …

(Obre Poetica; hereafter referred to as OP, 20)

In his first volume of poetry and in the next—Moon Across the Way (1925)—mirrors are referred to merely on account of their reflective function. The city is “false and crowded / like a garden copied on a mirror.” In “El jardin botánico,” “each tree is movingly lost / and their lives are confined and rugged / like mirrors that deepen different rooms.” In “Ausencia,” the reflection on the mirror represents the reflected object: “I shall raise life in its immensity / which even now is your mirror: / stone over stone I shall rebuild it.” In other poems, some qualities associated with mirrors are mentioned: the silence of mirrors in “Atardeceres”; their capacity for repetition in “El Paseo de Julio,” for multiplication in “Mateo, XXV, 30,” and for memory in “El reloj de arena.”

These random references meet in the poem “Mirrors” included in Dreamtigers (1960). In many ways this poem is a recapitulation of most of the previous motifs. Borges recalls his early fears of mirrors and asks: “What whim of fate / made me so fearful of a glancing mirror.” The poem is an attempt to answer that question. A first explanation is its generative power: “They prolong this hollow, unstable world / in their dizzying spider's web.” Here Borges reiterates an idea advanced earlier on “Tlón, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Facing a spying mirror, Bioy Casares “recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men” (Luna de enfrente; hereafter referred to as L, 3). And in the poem he writes:

I see them as infinite, elemental
Executors of an ancient pact,
To multiply the world like the act
Of begetting. Sleepless, Bringing doom.

(DT, 60)

A second answer to the same question defines mirrors as “a mute theater” of reflections where “everything happens and nothing is recorded,” and where the Other breaks in:

Claudius, king of an afternoon, a dreaming king,
Did not feel he was a dream until the day
When an actor showed the world his crime
In a tableau, silently in mime.

(DT, 61)

This last stanza brings to mind that memorable idea formulated in the essay “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote,” where Borges wrote:

Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map and the thousand and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

(Otras inquisiciones; hereafter referred to as OI, 48)

In a similar fashion, the poem “Mirrors” concludes:

God has created nighttime, which he arms
With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear
To man he is a reflection and a mere
Vanity. Therefore these alarms.

(DT, 61)

Here we get much closer to the ultimate meaning of mirrors in Borges' poetry. That illusory reality that mirrors produce becomes in turn a profound mirror of our own universe since our image of the world is just a fabrication of the human mind. The world as we know it is that illusory image produced on the mirror of culture, “that artificial universe in which we live as members of a social group.”² Mirrors, like the map within the map, like Don Quixote reader of the Quixote, and like Hamlet spectator of Hamlet, suggest that our intellectual version of reality is not different from that “ungraspable architecture / reared by every dawn from the gleam / of a mirror, by darkness from a dream.”

Mirrors and dreams have for Borges an interchangeable value. In the poem “Spinoza,” for instance, the lens grinder “dreams up a clear labyrinth— / undisturbed by fame, that reflection / of dreams in the dream of another / mirror …”, and more explicitly in the poem “Sarmiento” where dreaming is tantamount to “looking at a magic crystal.” Borges has pointed out that “according to the doctrine of the Idealists, the verbs to live and to dream are strictly synonyms” (L, 164). A more transcendental significance of mirrors in Borges' poetry should emerge, thus, from a syllogistic transposition of the terms life, dream and mirror. If life is a dream Somebody is dreaming, and dreams are, as stated in the poem “The Dream,” “reflections of the shadow / that daylight deforms in its mirrors,” life is, consequently, not less illusory than the images reflected on the surface of the mirrors. In the poem “The Golem,” the dummy is the dream of a Rabbi who in turn is the dream of a god who in turn is the dream of another god and so on ad infinitum as suggested in “The Circular Ruins.” Yet, it should be noted that the Rabbi's golem is described as “a simulacrum,” as “a distressing son” and as “a symbol,” and that all these terms have been used before in relation to mirrors. In the Rabbi's lamentations as he gazes on his imperfect son—“To an infinite series why was it for me / to add another symbol? To the vain / hank that is spun out in Eternity / another cause and effect, another pain?”—there is an unequivocal echo of the “multiplying and abdominable power of mirrors.” On the other hand, in the poem “Everness” the universe is but the mirror of a total memory: God. God, in another poem entitled “He,” “is each of the creatures of His strange world: / the stubborn roots of the profound / cedar and the mutations of the moon.” God is, in addition, “the eyes that examine / a reflection (man) and the mirror's eyes.” Also Emmanuel Swedenborg knew, according to the poem so entitled, “like the Greek, that the days / of time are Eternity's mirrors.”

The notion that the whole of Creation is but a reflection of a Divine power is more clearly defined in the short stories. In “The Aleph,” for example, Borges writes that “for the Kabbalah, the Aleph stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher.” And, in a more condensed manner, in “The Theologians”: “In the Zohar it is written that the higher world is a reflection of the lower,” and once again in “the Zahir”: “The Kabbalists understood that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; according to Tennyson, everything would be.” The pertinence of these quotations to our subject lies in the value conceded to reality as a reflection and the notion that such reflections contain a secret order inaccessible to men. Our reality, says Borges (our reality as codified by culture), is made of mirror images, appearances that reflect vaguely the Other, or, more precisely, as the sect of the Histrionics sustains in “The Theologians”:

To demonstrate that the earth influences heaven they invoked Matthew, and I Corinthians 13:12 (“for now we see through a glass, darkly”) to demonstrate that everything we see is false. Perhaps contaminated by the Monotones, they imagined that all men are two men and that the real one is the other, the one in heaven. They also imagined that our acts project an inverted reflection, in such a way that if we are awake, the other sleeps, if we fornicate, the other is chaste, if we steal, the other is generous. When we die, we shall join the other and be him.

(L, 123)

Borges' short stories and poems are full of characters and people searching for the other, for the source of the inverted reflection. Laprida, in “Conjectural Poem,” “who longed to be someone else” finds the other “in one night's mirror” when he can finally “comprehend his unsuspected true face.” The idea of this life as a composite of reflections whose source is the other appears even more clearly in the poem devoted to López Merino's suicide included in the collection In Praise of Darkness (1969). There he says:

          The mirror awaits him.
He will smooth back his hair, adjust his tie (as fits a
          young poet, he was always a bit of a dandy), and
          try to imagine that the other man—the one in
the
          mirror—performs the actions and that he, the
double,
          repeats them …

(In Praise of Darkness; [hereafter referred to as PD, 41–3)

Even about himself Borges has written in the poem “Junín”: “I am myself but I am also the other, the dead one” (E Siete poemas; [hereafter referred to as SP, 211).

Mirrors are thus defined as the residence of the other. Life outside the mirror, by contrast, surfaces as a reflection, as a dream, and as a theater. Sometimes the reader witnesses a dialogue between the simulacrum outside the mirror and the other inside the glass. Among those poems, none has dramatized in such a definite manner that old dialogue between the two Borgeses that reverberates throughout his work as “El centinela” (“The Sentry”) included in El oro de los tigres (1972):

Light comes in and I remember: he’s there.
He begins by telling me his name which is (clearly) mine.
I come back to a slavery that has lasted more than seven times
                                                                                                    ten years.
He imposes his memory on me.
He imposes the everyday miseries, the human condition on me.
I am his old male nurse; he forces me to wash his feet.
He lies in wait for me in mirrors, in the mahogony, in store
                                                                                                    windows.
One or two women have rejected him and I must share his grief.
Now he is dictating this poem to me, which I don’t like.
He requires me to undertake the hazy apprenticeship of stubborn
                                                                                                    Anglo-Saxon.
He has converted me to the idolatrous cult of military dead
men,
                                        with whom I could perhaps not exchange a single word.
On the last step of the staircase I feel that he is by my side.
He is in my steps, in my voice.
I hate him thoroughly.
I notice with pleasure that he can barely see.
I am in a circular cell and the infinite wall gets tighter.
Neither of us fools the other, but we both lie.
We know each other too well, inseparable brother.
You drink water from my cup and you devour my bread.
The door of suicide is open, but the theologians affirm that in
                                                            the ulterior shadow of the other kingdom, I will
be there,
                                                            waiting for myself.(3)

The reader notices without much effort that “The Sentry” is a reenactment of the piece “Borges and Myself” from Dreamtigers. Both texts are part of an exchange between Borges the writer and Borges the man, between “a man who lives and lets himself live” and “the other who weaves his tales and poems,” between one condemned to his inexorable destiny as writer and one who from the depth of a mirror paces equally inexorably toward his “secret center.” In both texts the voice comes from an intimate Borges who watches the other as though one were the audience in a theater and the other an actor on stage, but whereas in the prose the exchange takes place between Borges the writer and the other who simply lives, in the poem the exchange is much less symmetric. The confrontation is not between the writer and the man. There is no confrontation, but rather reflections voiced by a person who has reached seventy and contemplates, in the manner of Kohelet, his life and the miseries of the human condition. This Borges, profoundly intimate, looks at the other as a sentry and examines this sentry's visible and public life as a fiction or a theatrical representation. To define life as a dream presupposes the notion that with death we shall wake up from that dream; to define the world as a stage implies the idea of a spectator who will applaud or boo when the show is over. Likewise, there is an obverse of the mirror that reproduces and multiplies, that dreams and gesticulates, and there is reverse from whose depths the other—the awake one and the spectator—watches us. The ultimate meaning of mirrors in Borges' poetry lies in that reverse, dwelling of the other, house of the self. “Ars Poetica” has masterfully expressed this meaning:

At times in the evening a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our own face.

(SP, 143)

Of the various significations that mirrors propose throughout Borges' poetry this is, beyond any doubt, the most transcending and the richest in suggestions. In a strict sense, we are dealing with the mirror of poetry as a road of access to the other, with literature as a bridge between the visible side of the mirror and the other side which poets of all times have always tried to reach. There is a mirror that “melts away, just like a bright silvery mist” so that the poet, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, may go through the glass and jump into the other side—the looking-glass room of fantasy; and to such a mirror Borges refers in the poem devoted to Edgar Allan Poe:

As if on the wrong side of the mirror,
He yielded, solitary, to his rich
Fate of fabricating nightmares …

(SP, 173)

But the mirror that in the last analysis Borges vindicates as a vehicle of art is the one “which reveals to us our own face.” In the context of Dreamtiger's Epilogue, it is clear that the face he alludes to is a symbolic face which, like a cipher, encodes the destiny of the writer. It is this writer who “shortly before his death discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines (his writings) traces the image of his face” (DT, 93).

The poem “Oedipus and the Riddle” also adheres to this same meaning. Borges had already reviewed the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx in The Book of Imaginary Beings. There he explains:

It is told that the Sphinx depopulated the Theban countryside asking riddles and making a meal of any man who could not give the answer. Of Oedipus the Sphinx asked: “What has four legs, two legs, and three legs, and the more legs it has the weaker it is?” Oedipus answered that it was a man who as an infant crawls on all four, when he grows up walks on two legs, and in old age leans on a staff. (BIB, 211–12)

With these materials Borges makes his poem:

At dawn four-footed, at midday erect,
And wandering on three legs in the deserted
Spaces of afternoon, thus the eternal
Sphinx had envisioned her changing brother
Man, and with afternoon there came a person
Deciphering, appalled at the monstrous other
Presence in the mirror, the reflection
Of his decay and of his destiny.
We are Oedipus; in some eternal way
We are the long and threefold beast as well—
All that we will be, all that we have been.
It would annihilate us all to see
The huge shape of our being; mercifully
God offers us issue and oblivion.

(SP, 191)

In the monstrous image of the Sphinx, Oedipus recognizes his own destiny and that of all man, and Borges adds: “It would annihilate us all to see / the huge shape of our being.” But the poet inevitably looks for “the shape of his being,” and his written work is but the mirror where he will see his face, and in it the total image of his fate. But such a moment, similar to a revelation, comes “shortly before death.” One of Borges' most personal and intense poems, “In Praise of Darkness,” celebrates old age and darkness as forms of happiness; in the last lines he returns to the same idea presented in “Oedipus and the Riddle” but now in order to tell us that if art is “the imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced” (OI, 4) it is so because that last line to be traced by a hand stronger than any destiny (Death) is still missing:

From south and east and west and north,
roads coming together have led me
to my secret center.
These roads were footsteps and echoes,
women, men, agonies, rebirths,
days and nights,
daydreams and dreams,
each single moment of my yesterdays
and the world's yesterdays,
the firm sword of the Dane and the moon
                    of the Persian,
the deeds of the dead,
shared love, words,
Emerson, and snow, and so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I shall know who I am.

(PD, 125–7)

Only with death the patient labyrinth of lines that represents the writer's work is completed; only with death the labryinth yields its key and reveals its center; and only with death it becomes possible to cross and jump into the mirror and join the other, a way of saying that only then a revelation finally occurs as the outer image from this side of the mirror encounters its counterpart on the other side, looks at the shape of his being, and discovers who he is.

Notes

1. J. L. Borges, In Praise of Darkness (Tr. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni). New York, Dutton, 1974, p. 10.

2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Arte, lenguaje, etnología (Entrevistas de Georges Charbonnier), México, Siglo Veintiuno, 1968, pp. 131–132.

3. I thank my friend and colleague Willis Barnstone for having produced under rather unfavorable conditions this English translation of “El centinela.”