On Narcissus
and screens
For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror. He sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like.
James 1:23-24
I write this in adoration, a sacrament of looking. Perhaps the smartphone has really changed the gaze for me. Do I gaze any longer or just look? Sometimes I feel like I have lived a day entirely in my eyes. Where has the rest of me gone?
Twice in my life, I have looked in a mirror and been startled into a new realization of what it means to be in a body in a room. After staring at the monstrance, I begin to think, what were the first mirrors? When did humans begin to have reflective surfaces telling them what they looked like around them each day? Surrounding them, inescapably.
And then I think of Narcissus. He found the first mirror, the first available reflective surface—water. There’s always been still water, somewhere, and you can catch a glimpse of yourself, dark and shadowy, as though through a highly flattering Instagram filter, in it. Neither with harness nor with über-realism does water reflect the world back to it. Not a trace of high definition about the image, but a flickering moving image with a visual echo of your own whisper hovering around your hair and neck.
Narcissus is made fun of, held up as a mocking moral object lesson, condemned to languish for eternity, because he can’t stop looking at himself, because he stops being alive. He reduces living to looking.
And here we are, in a world where we see ourselves every day. We are consumed by looking. And our self is the object of our looking. We have become projections—a digital avatar of ourselves. Our energes go into curating our reflection for others to look at, and, eventually for ourselves to look at. What Narcissus discovers, staring at his reflection, is that staring at the projection for too long means you forget the self you are.
Twice I have looked in a mirror, and what I have seen has been somehow surprising, somehow, once again, fresh. I see myself, rather than just looking at myself. Or the looking becomes a seeing. What I see in the mirror is truly a reflection that points me back to seeing from inside of and being inside of the self I see. I do not forget what I look like.