Store-Window Mirror   Joseph Love

LIGHT

One of the marvelous things about a store window is its ambiguity. Especially in early dusk the view inside through the window looks just the same as the view of things on the outside reflected upon the window. It affords double information so melted together that it is nearly impossible to identify the difference.
It is very akin to the way I first attempt to identify myself as something distinct from other objects or persons around me, and establish my own space. It is a strange truth that when I want to search into myself, I must start by going out of myself into the world, where I find myself reflected in all the things and persons that I gaze upon. It strikes me that Rimbaud's famous words "Je est un autre" are both right and wrong - wrong because this realization is only the very first step toward knowing his own identity, and he remains imbedded inside himself in a hell which he has invented solely out of his own imagination, with no support from the outside world. He has entered into a spaceless vacuum, in which he sees a perpetually isolated and distorted image of himself, and this image forbids him to mature and enter into the balance of the subjective + objective that forms adult life.
And yet if I go to the opposite extreme and immerse myself totally and unthinkingly in the outside world, curious about it but not reflecting on myself, I end up like a punctured balloon, shriveled up and empty of life or meaning.
I wonder if this is not connected with the statement of St. Paul, that we see God now as in a mirror, darkly (mirrors in those days were metal, dull), but in the future life we would see God directly. Each person or thing we encounter has this quality, to reflect the many faces of God, slowly coming to the realization that what is reflected is all created, and show us very tiny facets of the Creator, while at the same time showing each created being itself as really real. We look at the store window, and see both inside and out.

(from "Fujin-no-tomo" Apr.,1983)

Japanese text


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