Lips

I like reflections because they freak me out and I am drawn to freaky things. As my wife says of me, “you have a morbid interest in...” No reason to complete the sentence. If it’s morbid—that is, if it reveals the liminal, the edgy, the weird, the bizarre—then I’m there. Can’t help it. Ironically, I don’t like it and in fact I find much it more disturbing and unsettling than for others, perhaps including my wife, whose emotional fundamentals are steady as a rock and therefore less subject to mental perturbation upon witnessing the freaky. But I can’t look away.

The diseased and abnormal and decayed and shadowy highlights what we believe to be healthy and normal and good and right and alive. At least it reveals our assumptions about them.

Which is an odd thing in itself: We define ourselves by our frontiers.

We define ourselves by our skin, that which encloses us. But that’s crazy. Jesus said that it’s what’s inside that counts. I tell my daughters that all the time, though usually without attribution, and sometimes I believe it.

A few months ago, a trooper got in trouble with the law because photos he took of an automobile accident were posted on the internet. The photos revealed a young woman whose head became mostly severed from her body from the force of the accident, and her head was split open. She had long hair, and attached to her locks were the shattered remains of her skull. Gory chunks of brain and innards splattered against the upholstery. Pieces of her skull and brains hung from the seat and crunched metal of the car hanging from her hair like jungle vines.

Witnessing misplaced human innards is part of the job description for troopers and soldiers and doctors and morticians and all sorts of other people. But as for me, that made me want to collapse and cry. Not just for her, poor sweet thing, but for all of us.

Because all that gore and bloody wiring and fat and tissue—that’s what we are. That’s us. And yet who we are is obscene to us. Dreadful. Nightmarish.

We are nightmarish to ourselves.

Of course we are. What is a monster? A monster is a thing that is mostly but not quite entirely ourselves. More human than human, to quote Rob Zombie. (First song I downloaded from iTunes, btw.)

Even the soul is surely just an arrangement of our inner stuff, no? (Or is that a topic best left for a future post? Ummmm….yes.)

Reflections confirm a thing’s reality while throwing it into it question, and they throw into relief how much of our experience of a thing is built on assumptions and willful forgetfulness. On lies. Artists and fiction authors seem to recognize this better than do philosophers, and that’s why today philosophy strikes me as clumsy and ham-fisted in its attempt to capture categories of things rather than things themselves. Philosophy is a crutch and speaks to our weakness as reasoning beings, while painting and fiction underscores our ability to see things as they truly are—that is, as a mixture of conflicting appearances.

I stood outside the doors of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I was trying to use my eyes to see things as they are. I was looking at the reflection of the streets and buildings behind me and I was watching the people inside exiting the building. I was looking through the glass, darkly, as I always do. I did note this young woman approaching the door, and I snapped this picture. The woman from whom I cropped the photo above is on the left side of the photo. Here.

When I looked more closely at her in the photo I was struck by her beauty, especially her lips. They reminded me of the woman’s lips in Roger Van der Weyden’s “Portrait of a Lady.” Here.