On the necessary investigation of mirrors
Whose existence we refuse to acknowledge?
Did the night notice how the mirror looked
at you while you were asleep?
There are times I feel that there is nothing more fascinating than a
mirror. No, I am not talking about the vanity-element embedded in
mirrors and what they do, meaning ‘reflection’. Take mirror and use it
as metaphor and I believe a can of worms is immediately opened, a can
that we don’t want to open but we have to if we are to purge ourselves
of ego and other unholy and/or intellect-clouding things.
Human beings are vain creatures. We doll ourselves up in ways that we
believe make us look pretty/acceptable to those we care about or who we
wish to attract or impress.
We do it with clothes, hair-gel, hair-style, lipstick, shoes,
sandals, colour-mix, accessories, gestures, tone of voice, choice of
words, planned silences etc. ‘I do it to feel good about myself’ some
say, but that’s incomplete answer. Yes, there is an element of
feel-good-need that is factored into the dolling process, but a large
part of the ‘I’ of the ‘I feel good’ is but an aggregate and mean of the
‘I’ that people get to see or the ‘I’ we want people to see.
It is nothing extraordinary. As social animals, we are defined by who
we are and by who we are not, the places we inhabit and the places
forbidden to us, the love we give and the love we get, the things we
take and the things taken from us and of course we are all shaped by the
eyes that we permit to look at us. ‘Permit’ meaning those eyes, voices,
minds, hearts and bodies whose opinions shape in one way or another the
choices we make.
To the extent that we depend on other people, form associations, are
‘social’ in our interactions, we are to a greater or lesser degree
victims of this condition. In other words, we cannot operate as though
we are alone or that norms, values, laws and other contracts and
relevant obligations do not exist.
On the other hand, we must not forget that there’s a point in this
‘contracting’ and ‘being’ (read, ‘living up to others’ expectations’)
beyond which we lose ourselves, a point where we are called upon to
exchange face for mask and beyond which mask replaces face forever.
Who are you? Who am I? Do we dare, ever, ask ourselves these
questions? As we walk through the field of masks and masking that
constitutes most of what social life and intercourse is all about, are
we conscious that we might be approaching this point, the
mask-replace-face point? Who do we belong to when we concede self in
order to satisfy self-requirements of society or some institution, a set
of laws, household ‘prerogatives’, the responsibilities of role, chosen
or chosen for us?
There is a moment when we fall asleep. Is ‘Slumber’ a country where
we can be who we are?
Is this why we dream? Is ‘dream’ nothing but longing for a real ‘us’
that we cannot be, paradoxically, in reality, in our wakeful hours? I
like to think that in these hours of sleep, the invisible but
ever-present mirror that helps us define the we that we ‘ought to be’,
takes a break as well, sitting on our beds, looking at our faces.
I like to think what kind of footage we would get if there was a set
of cameras set up so that the face on the mirror gets recorded, the
facial expressions, smiles, grimaces, frowns and other contortions, just
so that when viewed, we would really know where we stand, who really
calls the shots, who laughs at us, who is sympathetic etc.
I sometimes think that the mirror is key, not reflection, not us,
that we are both creator of mirror and created by mirror. I believe that
we are imprisoned, from birth to death, by the tyranny of mirrors (I am
remembering Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’ and the lacerations that
mirror, (mis)reflection and the image-fracture engender).
I think life is nothing more, nothing less, that a systematic as well
as random battering of senses with a myriad mirrors and that these,
rather than reflecting and showing us who we are, in fact do the
opposite, distort, refract, deflect and in other ways confuse us and
worse, prevent us from making headway along the path that leads to
‘re-discovery’ of self and thereafter the true meaning of who we are.
We don’t notice whether the mirror looked at us while we slept, but
it is not hard to imagine. Why let others judge us when we are perfectly
capable of judging ourselves? Why judge others when we haven’t even
started the long process of self-interrogation? How can we pronounce
sentence when we haven’t stood trial and haven’t exposed ourselves to
the most formidable prosecutor, that shady and utterly laze creature
called ‘Self’?
I asked this question a long time ago, ‘Did you notice how the mirror
looked at you while you were asleep and how the shoes took a walk
wearing your skin?’ I didn’t comment on the second part.
I think that’s what happens when we look at mirror and see reflection
and not glass, when we look at ‘film’ and see the play of image and
story line and do not see screen. Yes, our shoes take a walk, wearing
our skins.
We wake up and are clothed in foreign skin.
That is the source of our eternal discomfort with self-image and why
we use make up and dress. There’s a mirror somewhere. It is saying
softly, ‘investigate me’. We can hardly hear. It is so inaudible that we
could easily tell ourselves that we heard nothing. The next time,
though, it will scream in the manner of the random victim of the
green-red bheeshanaya, when silenced in the form of a pen being hammered
into ear drum.
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