Mirrors

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara's mirror neurons were in high dunder.  I would stick out my tongue, and she would imitate me.  The same with arm motions, the curl of a tongue as I made the shhhh sound.  It was great fun for both of us.  So that evening, when I had some time alone with her in the hammock, I started to tell her about those mirror neurons... only to find my lecture wonderfully undermined by irony: instead of looking at me as she normally does, she had begun to look in a mirror, and she couldn't take her eyes off of it.

Now, in most of the history of western philosophy, people use mirrors in order to look at themselves.  There is the myth of Narcissus, of course, and Plotinus' comment that "the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason."  Even Lacan, normally so far out of the philosophical mainstream, declares the Mirror Stage as the moment that a baby is able to recognize herself seeing her reflection.  Helena, however, didn't have much time for philosophical commonplaces: she liked the mirror not because it reflected her own image, but because it showed the back of the hammockin which we were sitting.  She could see both the front and the back of something, and she was thrilled.  Rita tells me that the day before I saw this game of mirrors, Helena was doing the same thing with Rita's image reflected on the computer screen through the PhotoBooth program, looking back and forth from Rita to her image on the screen, trying to make sure that both were really there.

It's nice to think that Rita and I are raising a daughter who is not a narcissist, but I think that something more is going on.  Mirrors do show us our own reflections, but even more significantly, they alter perspective, allowing us to see the world through eyes that are not our own.  When Helena was able to see both the front and the back of the swinging hammock, she got an exciting look at the plurality of the world, its three-dimensionality, and its complexity in the eyes of many different people.  I have mentioned the different concepts of knowledge in the west and among Amazonian tribes, and this game of mirrors seems to represent exactly that difference.  In the west, the mirror is a chance to stand outside ourselves and see ourselves as an object.  In Amazonian thought, in contrast, the point is to incarnate a different perspective, to use the songs of another tribe to feel what they feel, to use ayahuasca to see through the eyes of a jaguar.  Helena Iara, faithful to her second guaraní name, was using the mirror in the second way: to change her perspective on the world.

Alenka Zupancic says that this shift in perspective is central to comedy:

Thanks to the redoubling, we leave behind the imaginary mirror-turn logic for another logic, that of the shift: we get a reality slightly out of place in relation to itself... This shift opens the space for the symbolic Other as immanent to the given situation (as opposed to the Other constituting its framework or outer horizon.). [The Odd One Out]

The pleasure and laughter of comedy comes from this small shift: not to see the world from some God's eye view, but only a little askew, a little different.  And as Helena looked into the mirror, seeing the back of the hammock instead of its front, she smiled.  It was wonderful.