mirror recognition
Hey All,
It’s way too late at night, and I need to go to sleep, but I was working on the book and came across this, which I’m really happy with. I think it’s some of my best writing. I love when this happens.
More tomorrow. The paragraphs I’m talking about are below.
Thank you,
Derrick
I’m not the same person who [at age 23] interviewed Joseph Campbell. I look in the mirror, and I don't recognize the old man looking back at me. Just yesterday the face of the man in the mirror was unlined and slender. Just yesterday the man in the mirror could cast levitatus miraculin and fly nearly a foot over his head. But he’s gone, and I’m not sure where he went.
If you saw the two of us together, you might remark on the resemblance, and wonder if we were father and son. And you’d be right in a sense, though you might have us reversed, in that I’m not the father, but rather he gave issue to me, through thousands of deaths and rebirths, as he, almost as if through speciation, became me.
But what of him remains? What has not been burned out by metabolic fires that fuel our every step, from bound to stride to pace to stumble to shuffle?
My mother changed much during her life and up to her death, of course, but even at the end was the sturdy Nebraska farm girl she’d been at four and five and six. Likewise, what threads run through and hold up the daily incarnations and reincarnations of the child who became the young man who became the man who in this moment looks in the mirror in a room lit by a single bulb in a cabin amidst a dark and damp forest? What questions animated me then, and how have they evolved, and how have they remained?
Certainly for most of us there are questions named and unnamed that lead us step by step through our lives. Not that these questions necessarily control us, though in some cases they must, but they lead us, pull us forward, into, for better or for worse, werden.
And if, as some have said and I certainly believe, unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture, so, too, on the personal scale unnamed questions can become the real guides of our lives. How much of my father’s rage originated in the catalysts he claimed, from dirty dishes to bad grades to nothing at all, and how much originated in his own unarticulated questions about his own parents’ abuse of him? How much of his other behavior, too—his striving for ever-more money; or his having to get one over on someone: he ordered lots of things by mail and when they arrived he invariably, no matter their condition, called to complain that they were the worst pieces of garbage he’d ever seen, too crappy to return, so they needed to give him a discount to keep him from destroying their name—came from questions he could live but not name, and what were those questions? Perhaps it was unacknowledged motivations from unarticulated questions that drove my mother into my father’s arms in the first place, led her to not choose some other but to choose him. And what unacknowledged and unarticulated questions drive my siblings—and me—to act as we do, in all of our cases, again, for better or for worse.
What unarticulated questions of temperament or trauma, for example, led me to have as one of my primary life goals to live alone deep in a dense forest? And likewise, what unarticulated questions of temperament or trauma lead people to tolerate, or even enjoy, living in big cities?
I think too many of us—from the most powerful politicians and CEOs to those living on the street, and all those in between—are too-often driven by these unarticulated questions. While they (or we) may have conscious reasons we make decisions, other parts of the process may not be so conscious: our behaviors that led to the circumstances that necessitated those decisions; the way the decisions were framed—what options were left unconsidered, how were the considered options articulated?—the positive or negative consequences we choose to ignore from whatever decisions we make.