Reverie on entering Holy Days

I once wrote in a volume on men: He thought he saw an argument That proved he was the Pope He looked, again And saw it was A mottled bar of soap ... A thought, he said, He faintly said said, That left him without hope. — Refrain  from  the  Gardener’s  Song in  Lewis  Carroll’s  Sylvie and Bruno, 1889   I sometimes imagine an array of mirrors. Some of these surfaces are fine reflectors while others are foggy or cracked or but partially reflective due to some aging process in the surface’s material. Some face each other and others face away. Diagonal, orthogonal, pairwise skewed — a congeries of mirrors set in a never to be replicated  pattern. I imagine choosing a spot in a singular mirror upon which to focus my gaze. I shall have arrived at this moment and this place and this choice of spot after years of trekking through many other such mirror mazes. Still, I shall now marvel and fascinate at the array of sequential visions that are visible through this chosen spot in this mirror. The images will stare back at me at that moment. Not simple images, but compound ones that, if I look with care, may include me, the intrusive observer who has inadvertently been cast as a shadowy figure in his own observations. And after all is done and looked at, what shall I know of what I see? What is? What is smoke and mirrors?  And what may be contingent on the choice of the chosen spot arrived at here at this random point in the midst of travels? And what shall be known of the identity of others who fortuitously may be looking in on this maze of mirrors just as I do? Still and all, we participant-observers draw conclusions about the observed and write up these conclusions following consensually acceptable professional-literary guidelines in well-parsed sentences. Some of these conclusions are communicated to others. Some are maintained in silence. Many such conclusions that arise from such observations are responsive to queries relating to who I am in the diverse roles that I come to play in life. Who am I as child to parents? Sibling to brothers and sisters?  Friend to friend? Lover to lover? Parent to child?  Among them are those relating to who I am as a gendered other to my others. Male to Female and other Male? Female to Male and other Female? Walzer, while attempting to define criticality in social thought, opined that (1987, p. 49-52):   “Criticism requires critical distance. But what does that mean?... critical distance divides the self; when we step back (mentally), we create a double. Self one is still involved, committed, parochial, angry; self two is detached, dispassionate, impartial, quietly watching self one. ... Self three would be better still ... We form a certain picture of ourselves and the picture is painful. But this is most often a picture of ourselves as we are seen or think we are seen ... by people we value. We do not look at ourselves from nowhere in particular but through the eyes of particular other people. ... We apply standards  that we share with the others to the others.   Walzer has, in some sense perhaps, captured my dilemma. I feel a compelling need for attachment to a multiplicity of constituent  parts of me that meet the World. These allow for the possibility of experience and feeling that are birthed, in part, by some repeated internal feedback mechanism from the others who populate my World and who appear peering back at me in and from my maze of mirrors.    Like Carroll’s befuddled and befuddling Gardener (above), I may come to imagine that the organization of my visions about myself and about who I am represent a structured argument about the observed. These may be thought to have the infallible force of the Mathematics that Carroll, the eccentric teacher of this subject, presented as Tutor to Christ College. Like the Gardener, however, who mouths these words with tears rolling down his cheeks, I must be prepared to consider that, in fact, I typically find aught but a cursorily assembled handful of miscolored fats that may well melt away under the pressures of a lone trickle of water.  A voice calls out to me from an inhospitable and poorly landmarked wilderness: Change your focus in the mirrors and change your reality! Maybe so. In any case, I shall take this opportunity to reflect on a number of matters that relate to the interweaving of my senses of myself as a person and as a male person. Particularly, I find myself drawn to matters connected to my perception of myself as another to another. I shall be hard-pressed to separate out what others perceive in me from what I imagine they see in me. Therefore, I shall be unable to unambiguously separate between the two that I continue to consider the standard equipment that I bring to any and all considerations of this kind. I shall be satisfied to have shared the views of a singular male who qua child, sibling, lover/husband, father and male has arrived ... somehow and somewhere or other into the Twenty First Century[2] .