distorting lens). And the mirror is haunted by the relationship between
illusion and reality, since the image both reflects and intercepts the real.
The mirror, then, has many different connotations, and any text may
engage with several of these meanings at once.
Some possible aspects of the mirror you might want to emphasise
could be:
- as a metaphor for identity
- the inversion of the image in the mirror
- body image
- looking in the mirror as a form of introspection
- a distorting mirror
- a room of mirrors
- memory as a series of mirrors
- history as a series of mirrors
- the gendered mirror
- working by association. Ideas related to the mirror such as shadows,
echoes, reflections, twins and likenesses (you may be able to work out-
wards from the idea of the mirror into related concepts).
As you ‘run’ with the referent you might make a list of possible ideas you
could follow up, or jot down phrases or words that come to mind, but still
feel unable to cohere them into a creative text. Here are some of the ways
that you can mobilise the ideas in broad outline:
- using the mirror as part of an incident
- describing the sensation of looking in the mirror
- using the mirror as a metaphor.
The referent can therefore be employed as a means of exploring psycho-
logical or political content. Through the mirror we might probe the fluid
or unstable nature of identity; through the map, the complexities of
migration; through the machine, the problems of mechanisation in con-
temporary society. The interest of the map or the mirror, in particular, is
that they lend themselves to metaphor. The mirror, for example, can
become a metaphor for subjectivity.
Let’s look at some examples of using the mirror as a referent, firstly
Rhyll McMaster’s poem ‘The Mirror’.
Example 1.23
I look into the mirror of my life
and see my mother.20 The Writing Experiment