by Allie McKean

“A source whose origin is unresolved remains inexhaustible” (95). Leah Flax Barber’s The Mirror of Simple Souls kicks up not only the context and confines of a global history, literature, and culture into the present air— but at the histories, literacies, and cultures of the soul, of the individual— mapped of many spoken for and unspoken for melancholias. Flax Barber is keenly aware that the id of living may not be found in the object of life— but rather living’s recursive method of action, discovery, endurance, and consequence. Brilliantly, The Mirror of Simple Souls illustrates this in three imaginative movements— with pretend and performance at its core, the soul of this book gets worked through purely representational events that forcibly reveal the complex inner-workings of the experience of the human condition. All in all, we get a lyric whose strength comes from its speaker’s declarative unabsolvedness— “this is a rigid art / that sings inward” (38). A lyric whose churning is as strong as its silences.

Flax Barber begins through Columbina, a “servant girl” stock character portrayed in the sixteenth century Italian commedia dell’arte— a form of theater often performed through situational and improvisational scenes. Flax Barber tells us “The shape of my character starts / Not in my mind / But in my experience” (18)— sharply, we gather a sense of origin in the speaker that is not one of selfhood, but of response— one that is staged and performed. The voice is slippery as Flax Barber silently and fictively moves behind the actress playing Columbina and the character of Columbina herself. In doing this, the text develops one of its strongest notions— the location of the self between performance and reality is manifestly inaccessible to the self and its inhabiter. The “I” is a collapsable space— caught between performance and relation.

The id of living is further interrogated in some of the book's most coalescent lines, “Being an actress I touch your hand / Without touching it” (29) as it mimes out the book’s epigraph, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “The correct and interesting thing is not to say, ‘this has come from that,’ but ‘it could have come from that.’” Telling us that what is far more evocative, and more true to the stipulation of selfhood, isn’t the defining of the thing itself, but the pursuit and inexhaustible qualities that coalesce into selfhood, into desire, and into discovery.

The feeling of repetition and response is scaffolded and amplified into the section itself, with many of the poems repeating and returning the same titles. One could see this as the motioning of scene-work laid throughout the duration of a play, or the recapitulation of events themselves— how the psyche replays, reinvents, and reconstructs memories in order to speak through them for clarity and new conclusions. This inexhaustible quality is often felt in the repeated poems called “Prologue”. Like interjected preambles, or Columbina’s attempt at situating the origin of her role and nature, the first “Prologue” mirrors the singular self to the global world in the first few pages: “Before literature and history / There was literature / There was history / It was ghost-faced / Bridled experience” (15). Thus, the kernels of history and literature are just as private as they are public— formulated only through experience, accompanied by a ghostly-kept record of human accordance and time. The self, too, is composed in a similar fashion. Flax Barber’s book holds the self up as a mirror to these global forces— an avenue as to which we can understand its form, populated by similar mutating objects such as literature, history, culture, the experiences of— a series of reactions and reiterations that furnish the singularity of the individual.

What gets left, when it comes to self-interrogation, or origin-seeking, is what Flax Barber collects in the second section Cryptomnesia— a psychological event in which one believes they are the originator of an idea that has, in fact, already been previously produced. We move from the physical stage of performance into an intellectual performance— the replication and reclamation of ideas and thoughts, moods, musings. This too is about slipping on a mask in an attempt to exhaust the possibilities of self-understanding— through a decorum of historical, literary, and cultural dressings. The poem As “After Jayne Mansfield’s Death Car” declares, “Culture precedes everything” (51), and is used as the basis of understanding the self in this way. A poem that hinges on its cultural artifact, “Walking after Watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” metabolizes this sentiment: “It’s hard to do just one thing / To sing exactly / What you are”. What results when one goes searching for meaning or “thieving” (42) through the arts is that “There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman” (45).

Here between King Lear, Kate Bush lyrics, meditations on Antony and Cleopatra, a rough portrait of Chaplin, actress and Playboy Playmate Jayne Mansfield’s brutal death in 1967, writings of German medieval Christian mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, we come up close to understanding “The basic shame that exists / Within us / In all arts” (49). Objectively untethered to temporality, we see this speaker string together a tapestry of cultural texts in which one borrows, copies, and reinvents themself in one present commonplace. Everything maintains its present moment, in which the speaker still resigns, “To be me is something like / The meaning of life question / So little happens” (54) in its earnest attempt to render the self-object. Here one gains, through cultural reproduction and art-making, “The wounded chance / To think in public” (57).

Flax Barber even paints a version of the artist as a thief with some of the most stunning lines in the entire collection, in “Hollywood Babylon” (42):

On the boardwalk

There’s a thief


A rose pinned to his dick

A shirt with little mirrors sewn into it


Warped little mirrors

Sewn on black velvet

The self’s reflection, when siphoned through art, is a stolen as well as a public one— by looking at art as a mirror, one comes out adorning mirrors themself, just another shimmering example of the looping and the cyclical-engined philosophy this book demonstrates in its portrayal of the soul.

We awake into the book's third act, Saturnalia— an ancient Roman holiday in which societal norms scale and switch to subvert their governed nature. Gambling becomes legal, masters wait on their servants and slaves, gifts are sprung and given out— all under the state’s awardance of a day of spontaneity, abundance, and liberty. As Flax Barber states in the endnote, Saturnalia was “statecraft, social safety valve. The comedy of Saturnalia is a melancholy memory-image: the slightness, revealed in exception, of an unforeclosed possibility of liberation” (95). The poem “What The Mind Wants” speaks almost directly to this notion in the psychic game we play in our self-understanding. That perhaps, deep down, we know that understanding our origin will not liberate us from anything the self endures: “Origin is the goal / To want to be denied it / And worse to be denied it” (87). Perhaps being denied our origin actually brings us closer to our highly sculpted, highly mutable, experienced, and historic senses of self.

If not already sensed by the repetition of words in between the poems themselves, the form in their uniformed leading, almost all the lines of dual reflectivity on the page, or the title of the book itself, the mirror in the book is the key item that causes and effects one’s notion of selfhood and history. Borrowing the same title by 14th century Christian mystic, Marguerite Porete— whose book addresses the seven stages which the self interfaces with on its way to oneness or wholeness— Flax Barber skillfully provides the meaning behind her own usage of title, profoundly, yet plainly (64):

The title The Mirror of Simple Souls implies

That a book is a mirror

It cures the soul of its complication

By manipulating its reflection

Or revealing it

A book like a mirror

Is held to the face

Complication lies

On the surface

In the face

If language is sullied

Through use

Is this use?

In this sense, the mirror is the statehood of the self-image. It is the one physical surface which reflects our bodies back to us. It grants us the liberation of self-seeing under the same comedy and irony that the holiday of Saturnalia grants its citizens: “pure freedom and liberty”. Our reflection isn’t quite the real thing, and as Flax Barber suggests, the mirror manipulates and distends the depiction of the body, the face. It, too, stands in as the “unforeclosed possibility of liberation” when it comes to achieving an actualized selfhood. The book is unabashed at banging on this notion of the impossibilities of self-definition and inexhaustible qualities that make up the psychic search for our souls’ origins.

Flax Barber has us re-encounter literature as a common notion: that books are mirrors and mechanisms of self-understanding. She wrestles here with how language, once put to use, is spoiled by its purity. Though this isn’t the last time she brawls with language in the book: “Each word is a bribe / Literal and hieroglyphic” (72). And the poem “Captive Song” imposes a colossal observation:

People like to read in languages

They don’t speak

Then they can enjoy looking

At characters and don’t have to use

Their mouths

Some people never tell anyone anything

Their whole lives

And some never say any words at all. Just as we believe we feel the whole world of this speaker, they too grant us some sort of “stately access” into the inherent inaccessibly of the human condition (78):

You are free to be the perpetrator

If you want to be

Leah Flax Barber’s The Mirror of Simple Souls is available now from Winter Editions.