It’s early morning. December. The light hits the snow and refracts back to the sky. The snow, a mirrored surface. A cold front from Siberia has gathered over central Canada and the US. The temperature is below zero. From the car, I can see sun on snow, but not beyond.
Though the snow is reflective, I cannot see myself there.
“If I could only see more clearly my own seeing—,”
begins Katherine Indermaur’s serial lyric essay which interrogates the nature of the I and subjectivity when self-formation is often created by what is reflected from the other—in other words, how one’s seeing is sometimes determined by who is looking and what they see. Not only in relation to the other, but in relation to mirrored surfaces, Indermaur asks how the eye creates selfhood in the gap between the seeing and the seer,
a gap in which new seeing is formed—
so what is one to do when one cannot believe what one sees? Or when one believes that they see other than what is there? These are a few of the many questions that Indermaur’s essay asks—
(here, I’m reminded of Audre Lorde claiming “vulnerability as armor” when writing about living with illness, and the importance of language, especially then):
Indermaur is not just investigating the self as a series of fragments which have meaning only in relation to the whole. The text also holds space for the fragmented body—
the body in pain, in seeing, in meaningful
repurposedness—the body dysmorphia, the body
living
with dermatillomania, the body disrupted or fragmented
by itself, by its own seeing—
For the double I of this fragmented narrative, there is little forward movement. The essay refuses progression, rather moving sideways toward realizations about the self and the other, about identity formation and the mirror’s illusions. The fragments serve to subvert the reader’s expectations about narratological structures, while also subverting expectations as to how the self is fractured by the eye—by what is both inside and outside the mirror’s frame—
“Glass is stronger in its molten state than it is at room temperature.
How uncomfortable, the potential for shatter.”
The result of this fragmentation is the idea that the parts of the whole are important because one might not get to be whole. It also highlights the nature of certain illnesses in that there is sometimes a repetitiveness of symptoms or pain like a grief cycle that does not allow for progression beyond it. It is instead a stuckness, the narrative always pushing back on itself. It is an inner narrative that Indermaur highlights: it is the other who is changed by illness that reflects what the eye sees or subverts what the eye sees.
It is also that the body is perpetuating what the eye sees without the seeing itself being a trusted or true representation of reality. What is truth, really, in this ocular-centric world?
Indermaur begins the text with a quote by Levinas, who theorized that the self is formed in response to interactions with the other. Levinas further posited that after this interaction takes place, the self is responsible for the other ever-after. As such, Indermaur indirectly points to the responsibility of the I to care for the other in the mirror, which is also the I. However, Indermaur’s I is sometimes cruel to the other as perhaps a metaphor for how violence begins—if one is willing to commit violence—even small daily violences—against oneself, why would the self not be willing to harm another? If one is responsible for the other forever, should the I not better care for the other (which is also the I)?
The fragments powerfully operate on these two levels: as personal and political—
“Seeing is the world
Haunting the body. If only it were this clear: Sight so precise (you and
I) call it a line.”
This emphasis on the body politic as overlapping with the individual body while both are in crisis propels the arguments of the essay: that one reflects what one sees: that one reflects the other who is looking back: that one is then a reflection of not just immediate surroundings but a nation and the world:
“The face our home country. We are each so many. Turn us ever
so slightly to see our color change then change.
Seeing (bodies me in) to being. Briefly, a filter over every face.”
The text itself could also be another face that must be cared for if we follow Levinas’ reasoning.
Art confronts the gap between the seeing and the subject. The art is yet another mirrored surface that is being held up to the subject and the other.
Through poetic, historic, and linguistic references, Indermaur skillfully suggests that if the artist and the art is reflective, then the artist and the art deserve equal care.
Indermaur’s text further interrogates the etymologies of language surrounding mirrors, reflection, self-formation, and illnesses such as dermatillomania, but it isn’t simply language that is on trial, it is the mirror itself: the primary mirror being the eye: Indermaur notes the hexagonal nature of a bee’s eye as mirroring the beehive while noting that the I of the text when looking in a mirror cannot make meaning of what is reflected there when what is reflected is painful and possibly distorted. Every surface on earth is reflective, Indermaur claims.
—outside the windows of my car which mirrors the parking lot cars and the snow, the snow
mirrors the sky that mirrors the snow: garbage bins and sea cans reflect snow and sky: the
icy roads reflect the low winter sun and its one good eye: but if every surface mirrors what it
sees, which is the true conception: is the sun on the icy roads where I see it: or will it
disappear if I approach it, my body cutting the light in half?
Indermaur’s beautifully fragmented debut is reflective of the light, and the dark inside the light. The fragments give the I over to the idea that the self is not one thing, nor not-ever whole. Instead, they allow for another possibility: an elsewhere in which the fragments are themselves able to see: are themselves eyes: I/I: looking back and forth across time and self to the other: identity-formation/fragmentation as all there is—
that one must break down what is seen to see more clearly.
That each time the other is encountered, it is with a different set of eyes. That one is always othering oneself in the mirrors that constitute a life, whether it is a face or a window or the snow.
That it might be the mind that is the mirror in which all light is reflected:
“If I/I’d been born in a time before glass. Would I/I still be this. Would
I/I still find fracture. I/I want to tell her she is hurting me.
Eye or I. But we already see.”
-Chelsea Dingman
