At
first the doctor’s hands and mother’s vag are its only indications as to the
borders of its own body: “I feel those hands, that vag, so they are not me.”
The hospital lights, to its nascent sight, assert clearly, “Outside is light,
inside is dark.”
It
develops speech in a type of feedback loop which implies crisis: When those to
whom it speaks react as it desires, it knows it has expressed what it intended.
Thus it learns words, grammatical forms, tones. But what if someone is simply
disinterested in helping the infant—that is, when something in its world
refuses to act as a good mirror? They react, in this primitive loop, as though
it has spoken incorrectly. Faced by a disinterested party, the infant overhauls
its speech, perhaps reconstrues its whole social schema…
When
it develops the skills necessary to recognize this indifference, what then?
***
A
circle of friends: The phrase itself implies a center, one for whom the circle
is a reprisal of the infant’s mirror-world. A constant feedback-loop of
self-definition, redefinition, constant necessity of status updates. The
subject required as center of such a circle is disembodied: Like Piaget’s
mirror-stage child, they forget themself as soon as they break out of the
circle. The center of the circle thus constantly reaffirms, by remaining
central, by considering their friends a “circle,” their own status as partial,
as fractured. If each friend relates to the circle in this way—i.e. as a circle—the quality of the circle’s
mirrors must be ensured at all costs: One fun-house mirror, one dash of difference between two reflections, and
each center crumbles into a crisis of self-definition.
Yes,
the fun-house mirror, fun as it may be, is cancelled, sent back to the factory
for adjustments.
Kafka’s
image of K. as he searches back through his past, determined to prove his own
guilt…Image of the softboi who goes into reclusion, earnestly determined to
check his privilege: Guilt becomes narcissism, effortful conglomeration of all
mirrors both present and remembered in order to justify the present, to save it from nonsense, for nonsense is the
ultimate crisis for the partial self, casting doubt on the whole process of
self-definition, opening the possibility…
***
Narcissus
did not stare at his reflection because he loved it. No, he stared and waited,
contorting his face side to side, scrunching and stretching it, expecting that,
as his mother had warned, his crossed eyes really would stick like that; and if he saw it happen, if he saw his
reflection’s metamorphosis, all his staring would have been justified. He more
than any other felt his own partial
nature and was certain that, eventually, the unknown would come to fill some
gap where a piece was missing, and he wanted to catch it in action.
Not
only did he stare, but while he stared he thought back on all his prior moments
of staring. He compared each reflection to every other, checking for that change
he feared would come; and well it did, just as his stare reached peak intensity.
***
Narcissism:
Paranoia turned inward. If Narcissus knew that his face would look the same
regardless where it went…If the infant held fast to its words’ proven efficacy,
even as they fell on indifferent ears…
To
the narcissist, all events transpire in second-person: The ice caps are melting
because I eat steak. Racial
oppression persists because I take
advantage of being white. I was ousted from the circle because I am defective. Yes, all these
illustrations use the first-person. Each also implies a mirror.
The
guilt implicit in such narcissistic formulations points to a hopelessly
far-flung set of self-defining conditions. Not just far-flung, but
infinitely-flung: To the narcissist, turned inward in guilt, all the world is a
sharply reflective pond.
***
To
define oneself based on an endless set of conditions…this is the height of
fracturedness. The archetypal bleeding heart is not simply pierced. It bleeds,
rather, from each atom.
***
“I
am Legion, for we are many”: This is the height of wholeness. We may equate the
fractured to the angelic: Every time you ring a bell, an angel gets its wings:
The angel is the prototypical narcissist. And who could become more whole than
Milton’s Satan, who flew from Hell alone, bridged the Night that divides Hell
from earth, and educated Adam and Eve, all while condemned, from the very
start, to the most profound of cancellations?
Evil,
we may finally conclude, is simply the narcissist’s name for “indifference.”
The indifferent ears to which the baby speaks, which cause its crisis of
language…The mirror which refuses to reflect…Evil arises as the possibility of
nonsense is introduced and is fully achieved
when nonsense is confirmed.
***
Satan
happens upon Narcissus, who looks up from his pond and asks, “Am I pretty?”
Satan
laughs. He does not walk on. He laughs in place, laughs so hard that,
eventually, he doubles over, leaving Narcissus to stare into the trees at the
image of his laughing mug, floating in ghostly memory.
***
Guilt:
Memory is Narcissus’ pond, and the fault must be there, else this present would
not be justified by its appointed past, time itself would have lied…
And
so to escape guilt, to enter through it into nonsense, is to shed one’s
arrogance: How presumptuous to think that so few variables flow with time that
their effects can be judged? That the
present can be justified? Tasks only
befitting a god. So even secular guilt is unmasked as a theological phenomenon:
It is the identity crisis of the narcissist who expects themself to be a god.
***
Narcissism
on a social scale: Satan laughs. While he’s doubled over, Narcissus drowns.
Satan is surely cancelled: He has caused
a suicide. For he must have known…
Not
only does the narcissist—that is, the one susceptible to guilt—expect themself
to be a god, but they presume that they live in a society of like deities. The
desperate effort to keep with the times, i.e. the effort not to be cancelled,
takes on eternal-scale gravity: Any condemnation is that of a god.
Pascal:
“God is that fearful sphere whose center is all places and whose circumference
is nowhere.”
Jesus:
Hell is to be “cast outside, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
All
events become signs pointing to me…world
as mirror, world as runes cast by a Druid…the infant has reached adolescence,
sits on a short hill, picking petals, “They love me, they love me not, they
love me…”
***
I
sit outside a bar in a city in which I know no-one. I understand the language,
but it is nevertheless foreign, it falls through my ears as through the
blackstrap molasses its speakers have never tasted.
I
am reading. The two men beside me begin to laugh. It must be at me, for they think
I will not understand them, somehow I give off the air of a foreigner…My eyes refocus mid-sentence, “…the educated,
who see little need for such theological questions, are only indifferent
because they have adopted religious forms in another guise.”
This
work is an indictment to the same degree that it is a series of introspective
observations. It is, nevertheless, an indictment rather than a diagnosis. “For
all have sinned and fall short...”
***
The
whole person, Legion, the Eunuch: Without a doubt the most horrifying presence
to such the paranoiac I have described here. Not simply a dysfunctional mirror,
but a mirror that may, at any time, show any possible reflection: Recall that
time, to the Eunuch, is received in its immeasurable—i.e. non-quantitative—entirety and shat into the next moment as such,
and on and on. All is elevated—not reduced, but elevated—to nonsense, the fear
of which has driven all the paranoiac movements outlined above. Nonsense, the
final shattering of identity, the sickness unto death of the partial self, the
demand: Just as one must format a photo to bleed over margins if it is to fill
the whole page, so also thee…
It’s
funny, in the end: Fear of nonsense drives the paranoiac to erect around themself
a circle of mirrors. Their position as center of the circle forces the
paranoiac, at every moment, to reaffirm their partial nature—that is, to
reaffirm that which makes nonsense a threat in the first place. The only escape
from this vicious cycle is nonsense itself…to laugh at the whole big mess until
it combusts, and one’s own self along with it.
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