On Reflection
How many more times each day do you think we see our own faces, compared to the humans of the past?
The mirror, the perfect mirror, is a sophisticated piece of human technology, uncommon even a century ago. Glass and windows, a dimmer reflection, were more common to encounter in more human lives, but not to our modern excess. Further back, before glass could be made or metal shaped, a flat stone, polished smooth, could have sufficed, out of even dimmer necessity. But in most human lifetimes, until very recently, from the many basic farming lives lived in the last ten thousand years, to the eons before that of lives spent roaming, hunting, and gathering, we almost never would have seen our reflection.
We would have had water, though. Still water alone can reflect, and when captured in a bowl a human could glance down into their own reflection. At some point the bowl itself had not been invented, but still water can be found in ponds, smoothly flowing streams, the stillest seas. But water does not sit vertically, as on a wall. You would only see yourself looking down, you would not see yourself as you stand, as others see you. You would not walk around your home or environment and casually, accidentally see yourself.
Today we are inundated with reflection. Mirrors hang prominently in every bathroom and hall. The sheen of glass is everywhere, in window store fronts, in every passing vehicle. And as if that bounty of immediacy were not enough, we have also invented the camera, the image, the perfect image, frozen in time and preserved for a theoretical eternity. You can even see the back of your own head.
We are fairly used to seeing ourselves in the mirror - we recognize that person, we are not startled to see them. This probably would be unrelatable to a person from millennia past. They might understand our obsession, but would they understand our seeming nonchalance? Could they understand how this could feel normal to us? Does it, in fact, feel normal to us?
Is this a stable equilibrium, our relationship to our own reflection, our own image? We're only 100 or so years into this world of frequent reflection, and the ubiquity of the self-image has only become inescapable within this lifetime. I can't help but feel like our relationship with the concept of our own image, with the reality of our own reflection, is still totally in flux. The human brain, jostled, mid-society, by a whole new personal social capability.
Our first action is sure to lead to reaction. Perhaps now we are in the lustful throes of indulgent excess, finding the ways that the mythic qualities of pride and shame combine to birth addiction, perhaps this new aesthetic pleasure suggests, implies, cries out for, a new ascetic principle. If that is the two-step we have begun, I don't yet see much in the way of signs and wonders, but again - it’s only been twenty years. Lives must be lived to understand how lives are lived, mythic tropes take time to congeal out of lived experience.
This thread of the human experience is on my mind these days, because I have broken my own reflection. On New Year's Day, before dawn, I shaved my whole head. I've had a beard for half my life at this point, and I've shaved it off every couple of years just because, but never in my life have I had no hair on my head. Or rather, at some point, as a developing fetus, whose age had not yet begun, I had no hair, but my mother tells me that at birth, when my age began, there was hair upon my head. I have never seen my own head, my whole head.
And now I receive a continual drip feed of unexpected eye contact with a stranger, I catch glances of this unfamiliar person in every mirror, in every window that I happen upon. He is not me. His head is too small, the dimensions are all wrong, the color palette is too uniform. Shorn of hairy context, his mouth smiles oddly, the wrinkles of his eyes distract. I wouldn't say that smiling in the mirror, or for a self-taken photograph, has ever been a particularly natural act for me, but when I look in the mirror today it feels nearly impossible to turn these current eyes, these lips, these cheeks, these teeth into a smile. I look at him; he looks at me; I am not me.
Then I walk away from the mirror, I can no longer see my reflection to confirm that I am not me, and I quickly forget that fact. I walk into a music store, greet the cashier - and he does not know that I am not me. I sit down at the drums next to an eight year-old girl, a budding drummer, and we play together, and I forget that I am not me. I be me. She sees me, takes me in, in affect and appearance, thinks me normal, unremarkable but for this remarkable experience of playing together, she does not know how ridiculous I look, how not me I am in this moment. I drum with her father too, and tell them the secret - that I am not me, that they have been fooled by this foolish visage, that today I wear a mask of another man, or more accurately, have taken off the mask of hair I have always worn and with which I identify. “Looks natural”, the father replies, bewildering me.
It is the experiment in waiting that excites me now. I have no other choice, and it is what there is to look forward to, starting fresh, from zero. At what rate will the hairs on my head grow? How will that differ, top to bottom, left to right, front to back? My age advances, my hair thins - where has my hair thinned most? The color of my hair has changed throughout my life - blonde and strawberry blonde, brown and red, white and dull black. Where is it what colors today?
And who will meet me in this time? What lifelong relationship may begin, as I look as I have never looked before, and may never look again? What people of my past will see me at this time, not via the image, but in the flesh, will see my flesh, my very scalp? Step right up - a limited time only.
And yet, despite the fact that I am not me, I continue to be me, exuberantly. I strike up strange and intense connections, lead the drum circle in Venice Beach with simple and insistent repetition, burst through the door of my friends’ lives like Cosmo Kramer, giving thanks and asking forgiveness as I so thoroughly impose myself upon their life and times. What news from the Midwestern Front, oh wayward one? And with head shaved today, what will you think of next?
I purged my life this fall, I got to zero, I shaved my head. I don't know precisely what it means or why, yet. But there is much potential, it is a rich symbolic territory in which I have deposited myself. Who am I to tell my future self what my present actions will mean to him? He will read it as he sees fit, or I hope he does. He should have confidence enough to re-examinee the narrative I tell today, and to not defer to me, today, who knows not what is to come, what context I am in fact in, other than my own past, which he knows as well as I. Give him the symbol, let him try the meanings, let him wear them and confront reality. Let him define himself with words that later feel hollow in his mouth, perhaps the very words that I say now.
For I am not the me that I will be, and only in becoming him, only in a continually self-revolutionizing retrospect, will I understand the me that I am.
