When the mirror cracks from side to side.
::We are continuing our dive into Tennyson, which we started last week.::
My Great-Grandmother’s book of Tennyson poems is as an object of beauty on its own, what’s known as, according to a few book sellers, a “red-line” edition due to the red border on the pages of tiny-print poetry.
I quickly found my way to The Lady of Shalott, Tennyson’s famous poem from 1832.
I know this poem, not because of extensive instruction in school, but because of the haunting music of Loreena McKennitt and her version of the poem.
The Lady of Shalott lives in isolation on the island of Shalott. She is under a curse that carefully defines how she can exist, one in which she can only view life through a mirror that reflects the world of Camelot passing her by on the road outside the window. She is not allowed to go directly to the window and look out at real life. All she does is weave beautiful webs full of images—but obviously reversed—of what she sees in her mirror. Her weavings are her understandings of the world around her, which she can only see backwards through a piece of glass. She is kept away from real human connection, unable to even view it directly from a distance.
“I am half sick of shadows,” she says one day, going to look out the window at the real world at the very moment that Sir Lancelot rides by. The moment she takes in the real world, the mirror cracks and her weaving unravels. The curse has come on her, and accepting it, she leaves the tower, finds a boat, and floats down the river towards Camelot. She sings a sad song, dying in her boat by the time she reaches the shores of that golden place.
I’ve seen several responses to this poem over the years.
It’s a poem about women and the patriarchy, or about the cost of personal agency. It’s a poem about artistic isolation.1 It’s a poem about the risk of engaging with the world, or the tragedy of wanting so much more than you are allowed to have, thanks to boundaries and the problem of being confined while longing for freedom. It’s a poem about the collision of fate and free will.
Interesting. Maybe. But.
I am half sick of shadows.
1 Corinthians 13, known as the “love chapter” and read at weddings because no one is apparently paying attention to the actual meaning found in the entire chapter, tells us that we currently see through a “glass darkly” or, as the NIV puts it, “only a reflection in a mirror.”
We’re all the Lady of Shalott. We’re looking through mirrors and not fully seeing reality as it is. It is after death, when we cross into eternity, that we see.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” we read in 2 Corinthians 4:18.
All our best efforts at weaving together a life, of making sure the right threats intersect at the right moment, quickly unravel when we finally cross the threshold into eternal and complete reality.
This concept gets weirder with modern life.
We are now a world of voyeurs through our screened devices, oddly choosing to be like the Lady of Shalott, even further removed from complete reality, in that we mostly see the real world pass us by through our screens, those “black mirrors” in every pocket. We stare at it, and it stares back at us. Filmmaker and author
made the point several months ago that television and films have shifted to accommodate streaming habits, but in a way that might surprise us. They are now serving as “background” content so that we can “watch” our favorite shows and movies while also scrolling through our phones.We aren’t even trying to escape through entertainment, but we must have entertainment in the background while we are being entertained.
Mirrors show things backwards, and dark glass further befuddles and confuses. No wonder deception is so wonderfully easy and rampant. We’ve trained ourselves to take our cues to reality from the unreal, the opposite, the darkened, the unclear, the distant.
All the while, weaving a life with a raging hunger for what’s real but relying on the mirror instead.
We could talk about artistic isolation, I suppose, but with a modern twist in which we are all isolated in life, but our art is created oddly as groupthink more often than not, so that we have a marketable product. There is a reason it seems that so much of the creative content in recent decades has become repetitive and nothing more than a mashup, rehash, or reboot.
Artists (in the broad sense of people who create anything) today must have a brand; it’s not enough to just produce the art; they also must create additional content around it. The final creation cannot stand alone; it must have peripheral things to feed prying fans and passive income. Artists almost have to perform for their audience and let them in on the creation of their art and writing, rather than working in solitude and presenting the final product as mysterious and beautiful. The world now must be involved in the process so that they might critique, have a platform for their own opinions, and simply poke.