I know that’s not me in there, I know that’s not how people see me. It’s an image reversed left to right, its watch is on the wrong wrist. But I can’t help thinking it’s me. If my hair is weird or I have ink on my nose, I could embarrass myself or not make it back in one piece, or back at all. I should not have left the house looking like that. A glance in the mirror is a check-in on my social showing. Like a twig snapped between my fingers as I walk through the woods, the mirror is how I gauge my potential and assuage my anxiety. By the mirror I anticipate the impression I hope to make. The image is for what could come. My interactions with others are tests, and I can never be sure how they will turn out. Without a mirror, I could be walking out the door into emotional or physical calamity.
When I blame my faults on others, people tell me it’s time I took a long, hard look in the mirror. It won’t help. My own face is the one I know least. I is a blur. This wince when I adjust my collar in the glass is a rictus of unease. When I worry about my weight, the mirror is no use; I need a scale. When cosmetic surgery has made my reflection young and beautiful again, I’ll be dreaming a waking dream inspired by fears of growing old and unattractive. I won’t look young and beautiful, but I will look like someone who cares enough about their appearance to have had work done, something other people have been doing, people like me. There will be comfort in that. Nobody can see themself in a mirror, and everybody wants to belong.
Recognition does not always mean knowing who this is. It can mean remembering someone who looks like this. I yam what I yam, says Popeye, who wears a sailor suit. I am what I am, say I, who wear my face in the mirror. The Sailor Man and I belong on our respective ships, strange ships, where he and I are uniquely who we are and yet just like everybody else. Crew members. We’re known by our appearances, even to ourselves. Without them we wouldn’t be anybody we could imagine.
Since the mind is our subjectivity, it can’t be climbed outside of, so we can’t think about it. But we have symbolic language, and so we do think about it, and when we do, we think of it as an implement. Historically, metaphors for mind—clay tablet, hydraulic engine, computer—have been technological. They would say more about the times than about the mind, except that a mind that thinks about itself will conform, as it can, to its idea of what it is, and that idea will have effects, which will reinforce that idea, and so on. A mind unconsciously conforming to a metaphor for itself is shaped and restricted by that metaphor.
The question is whether we need to go on metaphorizing the mind, and the short answer is that we do not, that doing this exerts a binding force on it, limiting human possibility to conformity to the next culturally authorized metaphor. Only ongoing attention to how this works can lessen that force even a little. Symbolic language is our defining capacity. Loosening its restraints requires more present-time attention than we’re used to paying. People have been practising meditation for five thousand years, but as a disposition of mind it remains methodized and peripheral. We’ll likely go on conforming to new metaphors for ourselves until it’s too late.
Metaphors can be slow to die, and old ones overlap with new. For three hundred years in the West, the dominant metaphor for the human mind has been—of all things—the mirror. In 1691, John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, used the novelty and ubiquity of looking glasses in English homes to compare the human mind to a mirror reflecting the world. Out there is the reality of the world, in here its reflection in the mind. This was four years after Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica had depicted that world as a machine moving through absolute space and time according to divine laws of amazing simplicity. What we get may be a reflection only, but anything in the world can be reflected. If we keep our eyes open and our minds innocent of superstition and preconception, human understanding can not only take the true measure of things but go anywhere. We’re not God, but we can do as he does. This was a new dispensation for the modern age: no longer the confines of the body and its debt to Nature but dissociation from it in the service of scientific objectivity. Our senses and understanding, though virtual, are reliable, and where they can’t go, our technology and mathematics can.
What could be more like a mind than a mirror? A perfect mirror is invisible, an ineffable instrument of reflection, imaginable only as its contents. What metaphor more insidious than one for an invisible power? A painter doesn’t need to paint a mirror, only to double the image. A mirror big enough would contain the world. If we look with innocent eyes, if we launch enough investigations deep enough into the glass, one day we will have the full picture. This idea struck many as odd two and a half centuries before Albert Einstein showed that Newtonian space and time are fictions. Observer and world are not separable. Relativity theory should have put an end to the mirror mind, but it’s been more than a century. The idea of the human observer at a remove, on the authority of a God’s-eye view, is the fantasy that underpins classical physics. It has valorized measurement and accuracy of representation and led to the dominance of Western science. More than three hundred years after a metaphor created a human mind reflecting a Newtonian world, most of us still experience the world as existing out there on an absolute grid of space and time, our thoughts about it virtual and in here.
But thought is physical. Every organism, including one that can think, perceives and feels bodily. Mind is embodied. It arises from electrochemical processes responding to external stimuli and internal sensations. Brains generate emulations for testing by a constantly changing world. Brains are, above all, responsive, and themselves changed by how they respond and what they respond to. Whatever ideas a mind might entertain, whether of itself or of how things are, they are memories of responses. They come from the past. They could be useful, or they could get in the way. The idea of the mind as a reflector has got in the way. Our conviction of removed and godlike mastery of a measurable world does an injustice to the infinite complexity of the steadily transforming reality that informs us. It’s been useful to a degree, but as a metaphor it creates an image difficult to unsee: that what we perceive is on the other side of an invisible glass from things as they are, and our thoughts about those things, and about ourselves, are doubly reflections.
When Narcissus sees his reflection in the fountain, he doesn’t fall in love with himself: he falls in love with an image he mistakes for someone else. For rejecting the affections of others, he has had a curse put on him by the goddess Nemesis. Fated to fall in love with someone incapable of returning his love, he melts, in longing, into his eponymous flower. The Narcissus myth is about harbouring a self-image apart from the world of generation and change. Unlike Narcissus, we do this not out of scorn for others but in our need to be at the same time uniquely ourselves and one of them. While Narcissus is destined to make an animal mistake, the kind a puppy makes when he thinks he’s found a playmate in the mirror, we know that what we see in the mirror is not somebody else. But knowing it’s also not us has us walking a tricky path between just-like- and not-like-others, between social absorption and social exclusion. Like Popeye, we yar what we yar both despite and because of the uniform. In practice, we treat our reflection as if it were us while knowing otherwise. But when a species intent on an interior clash of reflexive conformity at the cost of attention to changes in its natural environment, whether caused by it or not, has evolved on a planet where species unresponsive to the larger reality of generation and change are turned into flowers, that species will be turned into flowers.