The Mirror Experiment: The End of the Line

I uncovered my mirrors again. I realized that although I felt more like I was a whole, unified "me" when I could not see my reflection, I was at risk of going too far. To use the proverbial phrase, I was making "a mountain out of a molehill." Before reading a brief segment of Lacan's "The Mirror Stage," I had not thought much about being alienated from myself or recognizing the other in my image. It is useful to think about how the other might see us and be aware of the other, but there is so much more which occurs beneath the image we present. It does not take a French psychiatrist to tell me that I am also my hopes, fears, thoughts, aspirations, joys, sorrows, experiences, and responses, to name a few. Barring religion, I am the person who can best understand myself. That French psychiatrist might be able to give me a few suggestions as to why I think the way I do, but he cannot tell me what I think.

In covering my mirror, I started to feel more whole, but I also treated that wholeness with more importance than it deserved. De-emphasizing my appearance was unnecessary for my well-being, and had I continued that course of action, I might have developed psychological problems about images and the self further down the line.

My mother taught me very well as a was growing up: stick to the middle path. In trying the "Mirror Experiment," I swerved over to one extreme of the path for a while. By ending the experiment, I feel back on track to where I want to go. At least, that is, in regards to mirrors.

The Leg Experiment: The Pits

Note: If armpits gross you out, skip to the next post.

In addition to letting my leg hair grow, I decided not to shave my armpits. I would tell you that everything had been going along swimmingly until the weather started warming up, but that wouldn't be truthful. Sometimes in the shower, the armpit hair would pull uncomfortably.

All of a sudden on Monday the weather became nice, so I donned capped-sleeve shirt.s. (I'm still too self-conscious to wear hems above my knees unless I'm wearing tights) However, when I lifted my arms to a 45 degree angle, my armpits caught my attention. Hair poked out of my shirt sleeve. I'm not adverse to some hair showing, but it was like straw sticking out of an overstuffed scarecrow. This is the first time I have been legitimately grossed out by my hair; sometimes I think my legs look mannish, but I can conquer that thought. Not so this time.

On Tuesday I noticed that some deodorant had gotten caught in my hair. I won't go into too many details, but I was yet again grossed out. The hair in my armpits was a nice covering for such a sensitive area, but the length had gotten out of control. (I am reminded of an episode of the "Fairly Odd Parents" where the protagonists' parents don't practice personal hygiene. The protagonist's mother was able to make ropes out of her armpit hair and swing from building to building. Mine was not quite that long nor that strong.)

While taking a shower Tuesday evening, I thinned out some of the hair in my arm pit. I didn't raze it all, just took out the biggest tufts. It didn't hurt, of which I was glad. Now the armpit hair is shorter, more manageable, and I'm not as self-conscious when I wear those cap-sleeved shirts.

The Leg Experiment: Oh the Ankles!

Last night as I was going to bed, the part of my leg just above my ankles hurt. I had slid into bed, and every time I moved my feet, my legs would hurt. It was like trying to go to sleep with a sunburn. To try to figure out what was happening down there, I threw back the covers and examined my legs with their long, black hairs. They hurt. As far as I could recall, this had never happened before - my hair has never bothered me this much despite all the jeans, tights, and boots I've worn. However, yesterday I wore calf-high wool socks (because I'm home on Spring Break and my feetsies catch cold really quickly here in the snow); perhaps that's why they hurt last night. When I woke up this morning, they were fine.

Needless to say, I never thought that not shaving my legs would be painful.

This is from today's PostSecret update. I hope it's okay that I put this here...

-----Email Message-----
When I found out my girlfriend didn't shave her legs, I was surprised how much I loved it.

The Mirror Experiment: Photographs Take Me By Surprise

I was flipping through Facebook when a little red flag popped up, followed by another and another. Notifications! They seem to come few and far between to the college student who finds it as a method of procrastination. And to get three at a time - red letter day! They were identical: a friend of mine had tagged three photos of me. Curious, I clicked on them, and then was taken aback. Friday the 5th of March I had gone to the opening of a friend's art show. I was writing about it for my college newspaper, so I was sauntering about trying to catch snatches of conversation, opinions, photographs of the art. I had seen another friend 'o the artist about with a bulky, lensed, professional-looking camera snapping photos of the art and guests looking at the art. Her camera put my point-and-click Kodak to shame. She must have been a photographer snapping shots for one of the other newspapers among the other campuses. I didn't know that this art show was big enough to attract attention from other campuses.

When I clicked on the photographs, I realized my mistake. She was no rival photographer but a friend documenting an auspicious moment in the life of our mutual artist-friend. And I happened to be in the photographs. Before going to the art show, I had brushed my hair, but my mirror was still covered. Did my hair really look that bad? Did my clothes fit that poorly? Okay, the photographer had gotten my nose at an angle that made it look really cute, and which I can't see looking at myself straight- on, but still. I didn't want to face the reality presented to me by those pictures. I clicked ahead, finding it a safe sanctuary to look at other people. In the photographs, they looked the way they did in real life. I had been trying to run away from that reality by not looking at myself in the mirror and was confronted about reality in an image on a computer screen.

I have since looked at the pictures again, forced myself to look at them, and in doing so I realized that they're not that bad. Yes, I could have brushed my hair a little more before the show, but I didn't; even if I had, the messy clumps were in the back and I probably wouldn't have gotten them straightened out anyway.

I still don't like the fact that I have to see myself as other people see me. However, these three photographs were a good reminder that I cannot hide from that mysterious Other or see how that Other sees me. While on the article for my newspaper, I wanted to be the unseen one, the invisible reporter whose voice everyone would hear, not the interpolator in the photographs, in the art show. It would be like I wasn't even there. Looking back with clearer vision, that is a very frightening thing. I am not just a voice, but I am a body, a mind, feelings. And because I live in this physical world, which connects me to everyone else, I have to take the consequences of being seen as well as heard. Even if that means seeing myself sometimes.

I feel like I should have learned something, but I'm still not happy about whatever it is. And okay, I admit it again - the pictures really weren't that bad.

The Cuil-Off

My friend Coyote and I were exchanging texts the other day, and we were both familiar with Cuil Theory (see January 6th, 2010). We had run through the gamut of reference the post, from "I am an ocelot. You disapprove" to "My head tastes sideways as spacetime is reestablished." I couldn't remember everything the post said, although Coyote probably could have kept on going because he's like that and has a better memory than I do. I wanted to go in a new direction, so we started our own thread of disjointed statements. We got a little carried away and focused on random statements instead of abstract statements, but it was fun nevertheless. Here is the transcript of what was said - I hope Coyote doesn't mind that I've put it up on my blog. I forgot to ask him.

Most of what we have come up with exists in the realms of two to four cuils. Even saying that one of these statements is four cuils is a bit much. Anything beyond four cuils is difficult to achieve in the space allotted in a text.

Lizzle: A fish blows bubbles at the sinking sun.

Coyote: The sun is a red rubber ball.

Lizzle: A red rubber ball bounces down the stairs and no one sees.

Coyote: A sad, crying clown in an iron lung has a red rubber nose. He watches the sunrise through a fish tank.

Lizzle: A fish tanks lies shattered on the floor as two fish gasp for breath. The red carpet absorbs the water – the mark blossoms like a rose.

Coyote: A wide-eyed midget in a powdered wig hands you a rose.

Lizzle: Clocks strike backwards as the long corridor stretches before you. Black-white-black tiles invite you to play hopscotch. A fish and a clown take tea on the ceiling.

Coyote: A small fish swims in a fine china dish. The fish is the color of the sunset in Morocco, blood red and vital. There is a snail.

Lizzle: A knight sits astride his midnight steed on a dune of sand, a minaret in the distance. A single drop of water drips from the stem of a red rose in his helmet. His steed starts to run forward. A midget in a powdered wigs asks for a fish while china breaks. The minaret crumbles and the steed colors drape. A single drop of water drips. It is a picture painted in the trail of a snail. We are all in a single drop of water.

Coyote: The knight watches the sun sink as he roasts spitted fish over a campfire. The campfire is a djinni, sleeping in the heart of the snail. You applaud.

Lizzle: The curtain falls and the lights dim as a red rubber ball bounces through the fabric of time, converting laws of pi into laws of fruit pi and disheveling powdered wigs.

Coyote: Lizzle eyes a dark pie in her baking class. The pie is filled with cities, and the cities are inhabited by olives. Darkness falls.

Lizzle: The nightmare rides on and the fish swims upside-down in a red rose. The galaxy melts into Morocco.

Coyote: Morocco is a fine place to visit on holiday.

The Mirror Experiment: Lifted Scarves

My roommate's friend is visiting this weekend; that means that the mirrors were uncovered yesterday. (And I wanted to use the scarf with which I'd covered the mirror.) I'm looking at myself again, and I'm mildly disgusted. I liked that feeling when they were covered. Not that what I am feeling is anything major - but the slight bit of pressure to look at myself from a perspective other than my own is back.

I wonder what it would have been like to have lived six centuries ago and never have clearly seen what I looked like. I would be the murky image in water, the ghosted image in the window. If I had lived then, I hope I wouldn't have cared about seeing my face.

The Leg Experiment

During the break between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 semesters, I stopped shaving my legs. I was tired of having to constantly worry about my legs and their hairiness. Simply put: I was lazy.

After three months of nary a drop o’ Nair on my legs, I feel I understand that shaving has been conditioned into us. I knew it before, but I hadn’t thought about the ways in which it is conditioned. I recall summer volleyball practices just before the beginning of my senior year of high school where we would compare length of leg hair. I wore knee socks while playing to keep my legs warmer and to scrape of some of the dirt my shoes picked up. But I also wore them to cover up my hairy legs, and I only shaved the part of my thighs that showed between the sock and kneepad and my spandex.

It seems to be a practice among teenage girls – or at least as much as I can remember – to say how long it had been since they shaved. “I haven’t shaved in five days,” might have been the average, but then if someone reached the two week-period, the façade of disgust displayed by the other females in the peer group would turn into real repulsion. Any hair longer than a quarter inch was taboo. As we were stretching before practice one day, one of my sophomore buddies and I were chatting, and we got onto the subject of shaving. When she showed me the growth, I said that was nothing and pulled back my sock to reveal how much my own hair had grown. She winced as she laughed.

When we shaved our legs, we would make sure our teammates saw. We would know they knew we were performing this act of femininity. We would make our friends come over and rub their finger up and down our shins to feel how silky smooth we could get our skin. (Oh goodness, I’m really a feminist now. Yay! But I feel conditioned to say that running a forefinger up and down a fellow female teammates’ shin is symbolic of sexual desires and desire for the other body that is still the same as yours, that is like yours. I don't actually believe that last sentence.) It would tickle. If I rubbed my own legs, I couldn’t tell where I was feeling the most sensation – in my fingertip or in the skin of my shin.

My leg looks nothing like our society’s conception of a female’s leg. The feminine leg is supposed to be made of clear-cut lines and curves, a distinct barrier between the end of the skin and the air surrounding it. When I see the dark, inch-long hair, I think of my brother’s leg. I almost feel as if it’s not part of me.

Then I go jogging outside. Sensation suddenly floods back to my legs, sensation that has been denied for the eight years I’ve been shaving. I can feel the air currents my legs generate, and it is like Aeolus is continually kissing my shins, my ankle, whatever the skin covering the gastrocnemius is called (Calf? I must really have wanted to use the name of that muscle). My body is me. My legs are me. The hair sticks into the air at odd angles, exploring the world around my legs and interacting with it. The boundaries are not clear anymore. The hairs catch every cross-breeze. As fish can sense the change in water pressure and move accordingly in a group, so my legs can now feel air pressure when they move against one another. They are fuzzy. The prickle has gone out of them. Whenever I shower, my hair gathers in small bunches to mimic the rivulets that form as the water drips off me.

I can feel the world around me with my calves. I've gotten part of myself back again.

The Mirror Experiment

On Sunday, I decided to cover up the mirror over my sink and the mirror in my closet. Ideas had been bouncing around in my head, ideas about Lacanian’s theories of the self. I do not profess to have any great knowledge of what Lacan was trying to say in “The Mirror Stage,” but a thread of his theory has stayed with me: by looking in the mirror, I alienate myself from myself. By looking at myself in the mirror, I do not see me but rather how other people see me. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novel says that the essential is invisible. An essential part of me is invisible, as well – but here I start treading on thin ice. By veering into the territory of the “invisible,” I inevitably think of abstract, disembodied concepts. The mind is invisible, and if we think of the mind, then diametric opposite which follows naturally is the body. Thank goodness that in everyday jargon we don’t readily think of the mind/body dichotomy. I might say that we allow a trichotomy of mind/body/soul. However, we can lump mind/soul together, leaving us still to contend with the dichotomy of internal/external. May I have a third option? The essence of who I am does not lie more in the mind than the body, or the body more than mind. I am both. My body and how I think – not to mention how I feel – are me.

I covered up my mirrors because I did not want to alienate my perception of myself from who I actually am any longer. I grabbed a scarf and darkened the mirror, and doing so felt like cutting a string that tied me, wrist-to-wrist, to a vague presence. I didn't even know that presence existed until it was gone. The scarf covering the mirror is crocheted in an elaborate pattern, and though I can still see the mirror through the holes, it is like I have control over the portal to a mystical land. I know most poignantly that the mirror is still there, as did my roommate and probably most of my friends who have come to our room since I covered them. I do not have to look at myself when I brush my teeth, brush my hair, put in my contacts, get dressed.

My roommate’s mirror remains uncovered, however. When I am in a rush or can’t help myself, I take a peek in the mirror to make sure my hair parts the way it usually does, to make sure I don’t have that fabled bit of broccoli stuck in my teeth. I cannot escape the fact I see my face when I use a public restroom, or that I catch my reflection in a window or in my computer screen. I check to make sure that my hair is still parted neatly, or if I’m wearing my glasses, that they aren’t askance – it’s almost impossible not to. But the place I see my face most is in my room, and I have dealt with that.

I usually wear what clothes I please, and comfortable clothes, at that. But over the past few days, I have felt even more comfortable because I was not seeing what I would look like and how other people would see me. It’s a strange feeling to try to convey. I felt at peace with myself, like there was harmony between my inner mind and my outer body. I wish I could say that there was no difference between my mind and body, that I could not distinguish one from the other. The barrier still stands, but the lines have been blurred a little. I like not looking at myself but rather being myself.