“It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.” - Jorge Luis Borges
{Mirror 1: Is reality NOT mirror, mirror?
Once upon a time, reality hacker Jorge Luis Borges read about a short story contest “MIRROR, MIRROR: Modern Myths”:
“Mirrors can be truth-tellers, wish-granters, face-concealers, illusion-makers, even monster-summoners. Maybe the mirror shows an evil twin, or an echo of the life that should have been. Or a portal to another world.
What happens when it shatters?
Once upon a time, no one knew the phrase “Once upon a time.” You’ve read the classic stories. Now write the lore you’ve always wanted to read. Reflect in your own creative mirror, informed by your roots, culture, and background. Imagine a canon of diverse characters for today’s readers to love and loathe. Tell us new stories, fables, folklore, and fairy tales about mirrors, real or metaphorical. What do you see, and what looks back at you?”
Upon reading this, Borges contemplated:
“Is reality not already {mirror {mirror} }?”
Sitting on his desk was a “Stargate Infinity Mirror Tunnel Light” he purchased from Amazon. He turned on the LED and watched his illusion recede into the depth of dark and light indefinitely.
As he did it once - “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” - he started to google all things mirrors,
{Mirror 2: The Spiderwebs built for Empress Wu
“Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." – Alan Watts
Fazang 法藏 (643–712), the third patriarch of the Huayan school once lectured about the interconnectedness of all things, using the metaphor of Indra’s Net of Jewels: “In each of the jewels, the images of all the other jewels are reflected…the images multiply infinitely, and all these multiple images are bright and clear within a single jewel. The nature of each object is defined by its place with relation to all other objects. “
To illustrate these cardinal tenets of the Huayan Buddhism philosophy, Fazang allegedly built a Mirror Hall for Empress Wu 武則天, the only legitimate empress in Chinese history. Eight metal mirrors were placed in the four cardinal directions and four secondary directions, and one on the top, and one on the bottom. In the middle of the ten mirrors facing one another, a Buddha statue was installed, along with a candle to illuminate it. This setting produced an infinite number of Buddha reflections in the mirrors.
{Mirror 3: The killing in the House of Mirrors
“My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings…Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions...
I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.”
-- Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
After Yayoi Kusama’s breakthrough in 1965 when she produced Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, she kept building another House of Mirrors. Using mirrors, she transformed the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a perceptual experience. Over the course of her career, the artist has produced more than twenty distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. Today, she’s credited for the renewed interest in experiential practices and virtual spaces, and the emergence of the Instagram and Selfie cultures.
The climactic fight scene of John Wick: Chapter 2 took place in a multi-floor modern art museum exhibit called "Reflections of the Soul'', made of halls, rooms, and stairways lined with mirrors with lights and video screens reflected in them. After Keanu Reeves defeated the final boss, he was transported to the sets of “Enter the Dragon”, and saw himself in the mirror as Bruce Lee. The finale takes place again in a House of Mirrors, where Lee learned to smash the glass obstacles to defeat the villain.
At this moment, the music of "The End" by The Doors added a crazy, anarchic tinge to the proceedings as captain Willard hacked Colonel Kurtz to death in a trance state. The fires of the animal sacrifice blaze outside. From the purple haze of an invisible mirror, Jimmy Hendrix emerged mumbled a Zen Kaon with his guitar:
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
“I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.”
― Jimi Hendrix
Mirror, Mirror. The Horror, The Horror.
{Mirror 4: What if I told you, you never saw your true face? - Morpheus
The mirror puzzle has baffled philosophers and scientists alike for two thousand years: Why do mirrors reverse left and right, not up and down? Although there’s no consensus, there was a solution:
“Welcome to the True Mirror® Store!
Welcome! You have found the original source of True Mirrors® , the only optically perfect non reversing mirror ever created. This seamless non-reversing mirror is incredible, not just for the engineering, but what it enables:
The most important aspect of a True Mirror is that your eyes communicate naturally when you make eye contact with yourself. It is really you looking back! And not just what you look like, but how you really are. The standard reversing mirror is different - whatever you have seen your whole life is a lot less animated and natural than what is real. Now you can see for yourself!
Please visit our main site www.truemirror.com for the full details and story of this amazing new kind of personal experience. Also, our video's page has great pictures of people experiencing the real Wow that is them seeing their own light and life!”
Welcome to the Mirrortrix.
{Mirror 5: The Rainbow: another puzzle. Reality: Your private rainbow
While the Huayan patriarchs continued their thought experiment on “one is all, and all is one” and “interdependence is emptiness”, Western thinkers were chasing the rainbows. One of these rainbow chasers was Roger Bacon. He wrote:
“Each of a hundred men, facing away from the sun, would see a different rainbow, to the center of which his own shadow would point. Each observer would view his private rainbow through different drops of water.”
“Each drop of the rain in the cloud is to be regarded as a sphere mirror; these being small and close together, the effect is that of a continuous image. That image, like the image in any mirror, didn’t originate from the reflective surface. Watching a rainbow was tantamount to viewing millions of tiny reflected suns…”
“The mirror contains nothing, rather, it reflects light, which propagates itself through the multiplication of species... “
In the 14th century, Dietrich of Freiberg finally solved a major part of the rainbow puzzle. Having observed them in the fountains, waterfalls, and dewdrops on the spiderwebs, Dietrich contemplated:
“We’ll understand the rainbow when we have understood what happens in a single drop of rain or mist.”
So he created a giant artificial raindrop by observing the hitting a large water-filled glass globe in different angles, from 42 degrees to 55 degrees…
“Study the light,
not the mirrors.
Refracted reflected convex concave. “
“A delight? Or to enlighten?
Like the moon,
Earth is a gentle mirror.”
-- Two failed haikujam by anonymous
{Mirror 6: Are we too cursed, to perceive only, through mirrors, objectively, subjectively, and inter-subjectively?
“There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And moving thro' a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.”
--- The Lady of Shalott -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1842)
{Mirror 7: A Mirror Moment:
The true midpoint is not a scene at all, but a moment within the scene. And not only that, this moment revealed the very heart of the story.
The character is forced to look at himself. As if in a mirror, only it’s a reflection of who he is at that moment in time. Who am I? What have I become? What do I have to do to regain my humanity? Sometimes, it’s the character looking at the odds. How can I possibly win? It looks like I’m going to die—physically or spiritually. Now what am I supposed to do?
-- Write Your Novel From The Middle - James Scott Bell
As he read and googled intensely. eternity passed. What kind of a mirror maze should he be building this time?
{INT. Borges’s study - NIGHT
The computer screen half-reflected the reality hacker’s vignette along with the background of the room. On the other side of the looking glass:
{INT. Inside the screen/mirror world - DAY
Google
10 Magical Mirrors in Myth and Literature
100 Best Mirror Quotes For Self-Reflection
REFLEXIVITY on encyclopedia.com
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/reflexivity
REFLEXIVITY is a potent and popular concept; it is also a problematic and paradoxical one. The term is problematic because it is so popular today; it is used in several different disciplines to refer to a wide variety of mental, verbal, and performative phenomena that nonetheless share a family resemblance. Reflexivity is a paradoxical concept because the type of self-referential activity—consciousness of self-consciousness—that it denotes involves the epistemological paradox so well discussed by Gregory Bateson (1972, pp. 177–193) and Rosalie L. Colie (1966, pp. 6–8), in which the mind by its own operation attempts to say something about its operation—an activity difficult both to contemplate and to describe without conceptual vertigo and verbal entanglements.
Intertextuality on wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience's interpretation of the text. Intertextuality is the relation between texts that are inflicted by means of quotations and allusion.[1] Intertextual figures include allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody.[2][3][4]
It is a literary device that creates an 'interrelationship between texts' and generates related understanding in separate works.[5] These references are made to influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers' prior knowledge and understanding. The structure of intertextuality in turn depends on the structure of influence.[6] It is also a literary discourse strategy utilised by writers in novels, poetry, theatre and even in non-written texts (such as performances and digital media).[7] Examples of intertextuality are an author's borrowing and transforming a prior text, and a reader's referencing of one text in reading another.
Intertextuality does not require citation or referencing punctuation (such as quotation marks) and is often mistaken for plagiarism.[8][page needed] Intertextuality can be produced in texts using a variety of functions including allusion, quotation and referencing.[9] It has two types: referential and typological intertextuality. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts.[10] However, intertextuality is not always intentional and can be utilised inadvertently.
INT. Inside Borges’s brain - NIGHT
Two mirror neurons are conversing with each other, about the mirror tests and mirror stages, etc., etc., etc.
Mirror Neuron 1:
(In Chinese, subtitled)
You can’t understand my intention without me.
Mirror Neuron 2:
So are you.
Mirror Neuron 1:
Imitation and mimicry.
Mirror Neuron 2:
Learning and empathy.
Mirror Neuron 1:
Theory of mind.
Mirror Neuron 2:
Self-identity.
Mirror Neuron 1:
Mirrors R”us.
Mirror Neuron 2:
All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors. I think Lacan said it (in French).
Mirror Neuron 1:
Hear. Hear.
} CUT TO:
EXT. A Mirror Universe somewhere - DAWN}
{Mirror 8: Oct 02, 2021. Diary entry of a reality hacker:
A New Theory Indicates Physical Reality is Just Quantum Mirrors!! Yes!!
Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in his new book Helgoland, quantum theory – the physical theory that describes the universe at the smallest scales – almost certainly shows this worldview to be false. Instead, Rovelli argues we should adopt a “relational” worldview.
What does this tell us about reality?
Rovelli argues that, since our world is ultimately quantum, we should heed these lessons. In particular, objects such as your favorite book may only have their properties in relation to other objects, including you.
Thankfully, that also includes all other objects, such as your coffee table. So when you do go to work, your favorite book continues to appear as it does when you were holding it. Even so, this is a dramatic rethinking of the nature of reality.
On this view, the world is an intricate web of interrelations, such that objects no longer have their own individual existence independent from other objects – like an endless game of quantum mirrors. Moreover, there may well be no independent “metaphysical” substance constituting our reality that underlies this web.
As Rovelli puts it: "We are nothing but images of images. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which … there is nothing. (I was right!!)
{Mirror 9: Deconstruction is no game of mirrors.
“With bronze as a mirror one can correct one's appearance; with history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a state; with good men as a mirror, one can distinguish right from wrong.” -- Tang Emperor Taizong, Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government 資治通鑑 (1084 AD)
Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government, the first chronologically-organized Chinese history book, was aspired to reflect the universal wisdom of governance gained throughout China’s first 1,362 years. Unsurprisingly, It didn’t cast it’s patriarchal lights kindly to any female authoritative figures. One story from 資治通鑑 featured Wu remembering the days of Taizong, who’d been given a tribute horse no one could break in.
“I can control it,” she said. “But I need three things: an iron whip, an iron mace, and a dagger. If the iron whip is not obeyed, then the head will be struck with the iron mace, and if that is not obeyed, then the throat will be cut with the dagger.”
As we have easily learned in these postmodern days from the theories of “positionality” and “reflexivity turn”, the Song dynasty historian Sīmǎ Guāng 司马光, never reflected his own concervative privileged social position. Like the private rainbows, the standing position determines the sight, and the color is the trick played by the entry and exit angle of light. History could never be like a mirror. It is a distorted mirror, at best. So is all the text. If everything is reflections upon reflections of reflections, then what do we know?
Upon pondering this, Jorge Luis Borges, the famous reality hacker wrote down the following statement on the notebook of Gordon Aaraxs, an anonymous reality hacker:
“The biggest Mirror Myth is that we are NOT living in mirrors already.”
Then he read on the back cover of the book “The Tain of the Mirror - Derrida and philosophy of Reflection”:
“Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface.“
{Mirror 10: Before Mirrors. After Mirrors
If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed:
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
-- W.B. Yeats
When Professor Imre Hamar, the editor of “Reflecting Mirrors: Perspectives on Huayan Buddhism” (2007) visited the Huayan monastery on Zhongnanshan in the outskirt of Xi’an, he was disappointed to see that the temple which collapsed sometime during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) consists of only a small building, and only the abbot with his disciple live there.
However, the reconstructed stūpas of Huayan patriarchs, Du Shun
杜順 (557–640) and Chengguan 澄觀 (738–839), can be seen in the yard of the
monastery, preserving some glories of the past. The enthusiastic abbot showed him his reconstruction of Mirror Hall, a small building housing ten metal plates (as substituted for mirrors) and a Buddha image in the center. Lighting up the candle, infinite Buddha images became reflected on the metal plates. (Reflection Mirrors: Introduction.)
And the infinite buddha selfies didn’t stop there.
1882: Paris. In Palais des Mirages, a large hexagonal mirror room was installed at the wax museum Musée Grévin. At the turn of the Millennium, more than a hundred people came to see one of the last traditional performances. Among them was Mark Pendergrast, the author of the book “Mirror Mirror”. Fantastic light show reflected back and forth to infinity in the mirror maze. The Buddhas, along with Shivas, elephants, and the Arabs, were featured in the mirrors while eerie music played, until the lights went out.
"Can you measure the east, the west, the north, and the south, Subhuti?"
"No, Lord."
"Subhuti! Can anyone tell who is a Buddha on the basis of physical characteristics?"
"No, Lord. You have taught that Buddhahood is not a matter of physical characteristics."
"So one who is concerned with appearances will never see the Buddha, but one who is not concerned with appearances may."
-- The Diamond Sutra. Once upon a time.
} //end of mirror 1
} //end of mirror 2
} //end of mirror 3
} //end of mirror 4
} //end of mirror 5
} //end of mirror 6
} //end of mirror 7
} //end of mirror 8
} //end of mirror 9
} //end of mirror 10
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