[Opening for a proposed longer work.]
As my father instructed from behind me, I held the mirror at arm's length.
"Now," he said, "look at yourself. You at a distance. Can you see yourself as I see you from here, over your shoulder?"
I confessed I could and followed his every word despite not seeing the point.
"Tilt the mirror so you can see me. There. Now you see me. I am a different image. Because I am me, of course. But also because I am not you. Now, move it back so you can see you. It is not you in the mirror. But it looks like you. It is the image of you, but it is something or someone other. Here now, then gone. Get it?"
I confessed I didn't. And so it went like that. He had infinite patience. But I didn't have his gifts, his way of looking at the world out there as some kind of object that he could focus on, or not, and understand, by his way of seeing, that there was both sameness, unity. And there was difference. Other. And that, he contended, helped him in his personal life, which he said was all we had, our personal lives. The roles of father, businessman, friend, all of them, they were just different views of him but not him. It was this divorce from everything that helped his sanity, particularly in the final years when he became less, I would say, acute. And he said it had helped him since his mid-twenties when death, he was certain, stalked him. To keep that specter at bay or in perspective, my father returned to the mirror or some other method he had and the reminders of who he was and was not. He was able to categorize the images and the identities that went with them, he said, and he found peace, mostly, throughout his life. It was a quiet, distant, and sometimes lonely existence, from the outside anyway.
I am afraid the lessons didn't take all that well. But now and again I look out there as if in a mirror to see what it is that is there, or appears to be there. I try to see it separately, distantly, and not as a part of me. But I have not had the peaceful moments my father said he had. I look over my shoulder now, and I know he is there even though I cannot see him in detail anymore. I know he is there. And clinging to that, I suppose, has led me to try and try again to get it, that elusive subject or object or image lesson.
I think today he would be proud of me. But he would have advised against starting like this, talking about the mirror and all. He was a private but not a judgmental man, except in some compartments he had created to get along, he said, in this vale of tears. Practical reality, as he called it, tormented him and kept him from being and doing what he thought was more important. What that was I never became aware of specifically. I only have the exercises like the mirror one that he would put me through up till I was about sixteen. But I have come along far enough to have taken what he tried to teach me and bring it under my own way of being, my own way of, can I say, understanding. So bringing up trite matters and metaphors and measures that he would not have used or talked openly about in front of strangers does not bother me, not now, not because he is gone but because I have become more of my own person. I live with my own shades, no longer his. And I get along pretty well, seeing wholes mostly. Well, I say I get along as good as the next guy. I can judge at least that.
So let's begin. I can try to listen to the story as if it were an object in view and quite separate from me, so much so that they can tell the story as if I am not part of it, although it will look like I am, and sometimes it will feel pretty close to home I'm sure.
RO
