excerpt from
Gnomes
Mirrors as environments trough the self out toward an impossible angle from our blind spot: born of X’s, where the cross is reversed, but the mirroring effect begins long before light touches the glass. Some visceral tension begins the mirroring in us, and the glass was merely to catch it.
I looked in the mirror this morning and saw an animal of passion staring back at me—not directly from my face, but from somewhere along the edge that was then invisible to me: the profile that I can never see in action, but is always there, like the spine of a book when you’re reading into its inner nerve of silence.
Am I eagle, lion, bear, goat, sheep, pig? Mixtures, medleys of animals; melees, stews and watering-holes, menageries.
The look into the mirror initiates a contest between the eyes and the anti-eyes—a covenant, rather, and so subject to history, though it seems endless. From this covenant, an entire culture; and a science, and a rhetoric. A mercurial rhetoric: the mirror’s constantly angry, boiling with fluidity: it’s our own phlegmatic pace, when we’re looking in on our looks, our conscience, or our public mask, that makes the mirror seem still.