Looking in the Mirror

It's interesting how life works sometimes, in that, often when you begin thinking about a thing, that thing crops up everywhere. We've been talking about perception, about the way that our physical senses lead us to believe certain things, particularly, as shown in the film Crash, things about others. My 6-year old daughter was telling me about a new girl that's just come to her class. She quite carefully explained to me her process when she encounters new people - "first," she said, "I look at their faces - I look to see if they're pretty - and if they are pretty, then I like them." At first, I was so shocked and horrified - have I been teaching her this?! That this is the way we judge others? But as we've been thinking about perception in our class and watching a movie like Crash, I wonder, is this, rather than a product of my training of her, merely a human trait? Isn't what she does what we do in some way or another? We do look at people, we look at their faces, their bodies, to see what they look like, to make a judgment about their "prettiness," as my daughter phrased it. Our senses give us these impressions of others - as adults, I guess, we learn to hide the reactions we have to what our senses tell us about others - we learn to suppress those reactions - we learn to remember to look beyond the surface. But my daughter's comments and the claims that Crash makes force me wonder just how much we actually do dismiss our senses and look beyond the surface in the attempt to sympathize, understand, and love.

We are physical beings, but isn't that rather strange? Don't we sense and resent the dichotomy sometimes? How much does our physical structure actually represent who we are inside? I think it was the writer Simone Weil (or perhaps her contemporary Simone de Beauvoir) who once said something to the effect that 'every beautiful woman looks in the mirror and accepts the image, and every ugly woman looks in the mirror and knows that it lies.' I understand what she meant, I think; who doesn't?

I recently listened to an interview with the writer John Updike - he's struggled his whole life, apparently, with psoriasis- an unsightly skin affliction that can be treated, but never cured. He said, "It's a strange thing, isn't it, to be born into a certain body rather than an ideal body . . .[and] the whole idea of a face is slightly funny. If you can put yourself outside of the species a moment, [to see] these faces we carry around, the holes -- the shining holes, the dark holes, the one that shows a lot of teeth -- [it] is all odd beyond belief because it's my face, but it isn't really my self." And so we've been given these bodies, skins, faces and we are in some part judged by others because of them, but we are not sure how they are actually "me." Plato seems to think we can move beyond the senses, we can move to a reality which contains only an abstract ideal, but I don't know just how far we can do that - we, our beings, are both physical and abstract - what do we do with those two halves of ourselves?

(The cool picture in this blog, by the way, isn't mine - I found it on Flickr.com - here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fouad_bechwati/461745327)