gozzterLeave a Comment on Our very eyes are sometimes like our judgements, blind

Our very eyes are sometimes like our judgements, blind

Are you ever anxious about looking in the bathroom mirror in the morning? I’m not referring to the sleep-bags under your eyes, or the grizzle on your cheeks if you are an XY; I’m not even thinking of the recurring yawn that keeps your mouth busy while you fiddle for the start-of-the-day mouthwash. It’s the eyes which bother me. Embarrass me… Like they know some secrets that they won’t forgive. They get that mother’s look that both shames me and acknowledges our shared genetic ancestry which I have somehow soiled.

Sometimes I’m convinced it is another person who is staring back at me, silently accusing me of something I cannot remember, but for which I should feel uncomfortable. Still, it’s only the eyes that are not mine, despite being surrounded as they are by otherwise well-known features. I would like to make faces at those eyes, grimace, or stick my tongue out at them, but that would bother me, I think; demean me as if I were making fun of myself, so the eyes could twinkle in merriment at my mistake. I could never fool my eyes when I cannot even fool myself.

I sometimes wonder if my reflection is my conscience -Scrooge’s ghost of Christmas past. Or is it simply my anxiety about a ghost of Christmases yet to come if I do not radically mend my ways? Ways I cannot fathom, yet dare not analyse -just in case.

At first, I worried if it was something that I was doing to make them look at me that way: teasing them, judging them, or maybe challenging them like you would a bully. But now I am not so sure. I suspect it may be something deeper than that; something I should probably not poke too roughly. I have recently read about something called the Standpoint Theory: that an individual’s perspectives are shaped by their social and political experiences; I can’t say I truly understand many of its ramifications of course, but it made me wonder if I have been adequately considering other points of view than my own. After all, if I interact with an animal, surely it would consider that exchange differently than I would; it might be fearful, or curious, but whatever the case, it would be influenced by its own history, its own Umwelt. I know this sounds… weird, but does a reflection have a history, a point of view as well? Is it the source of the myth of the doppelgänger? Perhaps I should be taking my mirror more seriously.

I was walking through a large department store the other day, and as a shortcut to the menswear section, wandered along an aisle through some sort of furnishings area. I wasn’t paying much attention to the couches or carpets, but as I walked through a section featuring standing bedroom mirrors, I heard a woman laughing. Curious, I glanced at her and noticed she was alone in front of a large mirror. In her late teens I would imagine, she was dressed in faded jeans that were torn at the knees, a floppy, oversized grey sweatshirt, and her brown hair hung limply from under a pale blue baseball cap. Even from a distance, her clothes smelled stale and reeked of tobacco.

She had obviously been expecting someone else, because she blushed when she turned her head and noticed me standing there. “Don’t you sometimes feel that mirrors are reflecting things differently than you think they should?” she said, in a rather tentative voice, obviously embarrassed, but needing to explain her previous laughter. “I mean, not concave, or carnival mirrors, but ordinary ones that you check a thousand times a day to see how you look.” Then she rolled her eyes and glanced at the mirror again. “Not thousands of times,” she quickly corrected herself, “But often enough to make sure it’s still telling you the same thing…”

I didn’t quite know how I should respond to that, but now that I had the opportunity, I decided to take a chance.  I smiled and glanced at the mirror. “Perhaps this may sound strange, but what part of the mirror do you think  is actually telling you how you look…?”

I suppose because she felt she had already come across to me as strange, she smiled and seemed to give my question some serious consideration. “Well…” She sighed and looked carefully at her reflection, wondering if she should say what she really thought; then she shrugged. “It’s my eyes that are looking at it, but I’ve sometimes wondered if it is its eyes that are actually interrogating me: judging how I look…” She risked a quick glance at my face before sending them back to the mirror again. “Is that a weird thought?”

I smiled, a little surprised at the use of the word ‘interrogate’ by someone so young. “It’s what a friend would do if you asked her, isn’t it?” I replied. “But in the case of a mirror, you don’t have to ask; it seems to know the question and then answers it silently…”

She looked at me for a moment, wondering if I was being serious with her, and then smiled. “You don’t think it’s abnormal thinking that about a mirror…?” She seemed genuinely surprised.

I shook my head. “It’s just another way of looking at the world, isn’t it?” I didn’t want to divulge too much of my own suspicions, so I shrugged. “I mean, I think trees and other things in Nature may have agency; many indigenous people believe there is a spirit in the wind and even some rocks…” I hesitated before I continued, uncertain whether I wanted to be considered even more abnormal. “… So why not a mirror?” There! I’d finally confessed it -albeit to a stranger, but still, I’d let the genie out of the bottle.

Her smile grew. “I don’t believe many others think like that…”

Her voice sounded a little sad, I thought. “Not all of us live outside the box, either…” I replied almost in a whisper; I didn’t mean to judge her, and I felt a little embarrassed at hearing myself say it out loud.

Suddenly I heard a sharp voice shrieking just over my shoulder. “Panny,” it shouted, obviously upset, “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over the store for you. We’re going to miss your appointment!”

“You should have known where to look,” the girl replied in an angry voice.

The woman was much older than the girl and was dressed in severe clothes, just like her voice. She grabbed the girl by her arm and pulled her away. “Hope she didn’t pester you too much, sir,” the woman yelled over her shoulder, and they both disappeared around the corner without even a wave from the girl.

‘Panny’? Was that really the girl’s name? Or was it ‘Penny’? But the thought that I might have been as careless as Pandora in liberating who knew what into the world, occurred to me for a moment before she disappeared; I decided to be more careful if I ever met anybody like her again. I glanced briefly at the mirror that had so fascinated her, then quickly turned and began walking away. I don’t trust reflections, especially when the eyes are still warm from somebody else…

, , , , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close