Mirror Mirror and No Wall

Mirror (Зеркало), 1974

dir. Tarkovsky

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”—a voice whispers through the veil of time, breaking the silence of the screen. Mirror by Tarkovsky is the whisper of a lost past, the burn of memory, a ghost that returns again and again to remind us that it never truly left—and that we can never escape it.

This film is my life. Not in plot—because what does plot even matter when there are only nine or thirty-one of them in existence? Mirror is the spiritual homeland of four generations born from war, poverty, and ruin. We are all children of fractured time, raised by parents who speak in references and hysteria, whose dreams are soaked in the fear of loss and the unreachable dream of harmony—something that does not and will not exist in this world. It exists only in nature—in the sound of rain, the rustling of grass, the wind, in shadows and shades of light.

Everything in this film slips away. Meaning is not in words but in pauses, in silence, in the moments between inhale and exhale. The most powerful shot in the film is the drying sweat stain left by a tea cup, humming with the weight of time—like in Stephen King’s The Langoliers, where time devours the space of existence. That stain is a symbol of our inability to hold onto the moment, to preserve what has already passed. All we can do is recreate it, again and again—a mother reflected in a wife, a self reflected in the neural mirrors of memory, where reality is only a broken reflection, frozen in altered forms.

Memory is the only form of immortality. But it is also the most fragile and elusive matter. We try to capture it, crashing against the icy surface of a mirror, only to see a reflection—never the essence itself. And that is both a tragedy and poetry. Mirror is a painting created by time, dissolving faces into an endless echo of the past.

This film is a journey into childhood, into memories that can never be retrieved but will always live within us. It is the pain of loss, of unfulfilled dreams, of voices that continue speaking across years of absence. The present is fragmented, and the past is the only place where wholeness can still be found. They search for a father, but they find God—His presence revealed in a gust of wind, in a burning barn, in the stillness of morning.

The hum of time is not only Tarkovsky’s. It is the same merciless chill in Proust’s remembrance of a madeleine, the same inevitable fate that whispers in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. It is the eternal return of what cannot be held, the desperate attempt to break free from the cycle. In Mirror, time folds in on itself like a snake devouring its own tail—we watch as the protagonist marries a woman resembling his mother, as his son returns to an aging grandmother, as the circle of memory closes again.

This film is an act of cinematic psychoanalysis—Tarkovsky’s attempt to escape the captivity of memory by speaking it aloud, to free himself from its power, like Proust or Freud, returning again and again to places that exist only in dreams. Mirror is a love letter to memory, which betrays us; to childhood, which no longer exists; to dreams, which belong to another life.

It is a dream I don’t want to wake up from—because in this dream, everything is still ahead, everything is still possible.

And yet, perhaps I would have never understood this without mushrooms. They taught me to listen to silence, to see the spaces between words, to feel the wind calling me back—to myself, to nature, to the only thing untouched by time. Where memory fades, only the pure sensation of life remains.