The Art of Looking at Ourselves 1
What happens when you look in the mirror before going out? What are you doing and why? What exactly are you looking at…or who?, as Derrida might differentiate. ‘What’ being the components that make up the body and it’s surroundings. The hair, skin and features framed by the environment immediately behind. Perhaps we focus first on the most changeable aspects. We might have an idea of what we want to see and anything askew to this desire is corrected to a best fit within the limitations of time, money and motivation.
The ‘who’ is perhaps that expected image we have of ourselves before we look, which is confirmed on looking or otherwise adjusted over time to compensate for those changeable aspects we can’t adjust. The ‘who’ is not limited to this, of course, it is as deep as we are willing to peer.
What if, as you are about to finish a quick preen, you engage the eyes of this person in the mirror. Immediately there is a reckoning. Why? The eyes are just like all else, perishing flesh and bone. A green, blue, brown or gray iris or a combination of these set in white or off white, pushing through a hair lined slot in the skin and pierced by a small black hole. But they are also the locus of a terrible lie.
The eyes are the instruments we ascribe to verifiable certainty -“I saw it with my own eyes;” yet through which in perceiving themselves are unnerved. To engage with that gaze is to slip towards something that cannot be comprehended directly and for which inner narrative is immediately invented to compensate, reassure and fend off the gaze. I’m getting older. I look like more and more like my dad. I’m still a child inside. Unlike our features we skew the truth to better fit the speculative ‘who’ rather than correct the askew concept which the gaze penetrates. The gaze that whispers…”That’s not me”.
There’s a parallel here with that moment the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed in New York on the morning on the 9th of September 2001. Like most around the world the incident was watched live on television. The second plane caught in the act of crashing into the second tower. It was incredible, unbelievable and happening ‘in front of our eyes.’ Only the June before I had caught the Staton Island Ferry and watched the huge edifices unfurl into view as the boat withdrew from the port at their feet and with distance their incredible height could be appreciated. The next day I stood there at sunset on top of that tower with my partner marvelling at the cityscape below: a thing of indescribable beauty which I never expected to feel for so much concrete.
I invite you to cast your mind back to that very moment when the first monolith of concrete started to crumble and fall straight down into its own footprint. Who did not have the thought pass through their mind…”NO, THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE!”? Only to have the doubt obliterated like the tower itself with the thought, “But it’s actually happening. It’s not a special effect, it’s actually happening.” Of course, if it were a special effect in a movie, where the second tower collapses identically some minutes afterwards, our suspension of disbelief would be mightily challenged.
That afternoon World Trade Centre building 7 collapsed into it’s footprint without needing to be struck by a Boeing 747. At 44 floors the third largest building in the complex collapsed, like the other two, at freefall speed: the only three steel framed buildings ever to completely collapse due to fire.
Clearly, the whole event was a special effect in which some 3,000 innocent people died and for which twenty times that number of innocent people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet we succour on that supplied narrative that helps us avert our gaze from the fiction that is 9/11 and gives a continuity to the world and a sense that all is in its rightful place, even if and maybe because it’s a pretty tragic storyline.
That tragedy plays out on a microcosmic scale every time we look in the mirror. Is there a more private space than between the eye and the reflection of the beholders eye in the mirror? Is there a Rubicon on whose banks we dance so inconsolably? When we avert our gaze from the locus of our lie, from the crucible of truth embedded in our own eyes in the mirror, we concede again and again to the given fiction that we are that which we see reflected back: a person, separate from others and most definitely making decisions and ‘acting’ on them in a world out there which needs daily and exhaustive negotiation to get through.
It’s a lie and theatre can be a mirror in which the fiction is exposed, a simulacrum of us, deconstructing the way we use narrative to clothe our nakedness. But more often it feeds the thirst for narrative and meaning and shies of entering that private space of uncertainty which is the domain of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre.
The ‘who’ is perhaps that expected image we have of ourselves before we look, which is confirmed on looking or otherwise adjusted over time to compensate for those changeable aspects we can’t adjust. The ‘who’ is not limited to this, of course, it is as deep as we are willing to peer.
What if, as you are about to finish a quick preen, you engage the eyes of this person in the mirror. Immediately there is a reckoning. Why? The eyes are just like all else, perishing flesh and bone. A green, blue, brown or gray iris or a combination of these set in white or off white, pushing through a hair lined slot in the skin and pierced by a small black hole. But they are also the locus of a terrible lie.
The eyes are the instruments we ascribe to verifiable certainty -“I saw it with my own eyes;” yet through which in perceiving themselves are unnerved. To engage with that gaze is to slip towards something that cannot be comprehended directly and for which inner narrative is immediately invented to compensate, reassure and fend off the gaze. I’m getting older. I look like more and more like my dad. I’m still a child inside. Unlike our features we skew the truth to better fit the speculative ‘who’ rather than correct the askew concept which the gaze penetrates. The gaze that whispers…”That’s not me”.
There’s a parallel here with that moment the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed in New York on the morning on the 9th of September 2001. Like most around the world the incident was watched live on television. The second plane caught in the act of crashing into the second tower. It was incredible, unbelievable and happening ‘in front of our eyes.’ Only the June before I had caught the Staton Island Ferry and watched the huge edifices unfurl into view as the boat withdrew from the port at their feet and with distance their incredible height could be appreciated. The next day I stood there at sunset on top of that tower with my partner marvelling at the cityscape below: a thing of indescribable beauty which I never expected to feel for so much concrete.
I invite you to cast your mind back to that very moment when the first monolith of concrete started to crumble and fall straight down into its own footprint. Who did not have the thought pass through their mind…”NO, THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE!”? Only to have the doubt obliterated like the tower itself with the thought, “But it’s actually happening. It’s not a special effect, it’s actually happening.” Of course, if it were a special effect in a movie, where the second tower collapses identically some minutes afterwards, our suspension of disbelief would be mightily challenged.
That afternoon World Trade Centre building 7 collapsed into it’s footprint without needing to be struck by a Boeing 747. At 44 floors the third largest building in the complex collapsed, like the other two, at freefall speed: the only three steel framed buildings ever to completely collapse due to fire.
Clearly, the whole event was a special effect in which some 3,000 innocent people died and for which twenty times that number of innocent people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet we succour on that supplied narrative that helps us avert our gaze from the fiction that is 9/11 and gives a continuity to the world and a sense that all is in its rightful place, even if and maybe because it’s a pretty tragic storyline.
That tragedy plays out on a microcosmic scale every time we look in the mirror. Is there a more private space than between the eye and the reflection of the beholders eye in the mirror? Is there a Rubicon on whose banks we dance so inconsolably? When we avert our gaze from the locus of our lie, from the crucible of truth embedded in our own eyes in the mirror, we concede again and again to the given fiction that we are that which we see reflected back: a person, separate from others and most definitely making decisions and ‘acting’ on them in a world out there which needs daily and exhaustive negotiation to get through.
It’s a lie and theatre can be a mirror in which the fiction is exposed, a simulacrum of us, deconstructing the way we use narrative to clothe our nakedness. But more often it feeds the thirst for narrative and meaning and shies of entering that private space of uncertainty which is the domain of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre.
posted by ArmchairDJ at 11:08 am
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