Chasing Reflections

Cultural Bias

All my life I’ve been chasing reflections. Reflections that disappear just as soon as I catch up with them. Reflections of what, I hear you say. Try to make a little bit more sense, why don’t you? But I’m coming to that. I’m going to get to that in just a minute now. Don’t rush me. You’ll put me off my stride…

 

I’m actually playing for time here. I’ve lost sight of the core idea in my narrative. I’ve lost the gist – my head’s gone on me again. I had it for a moment but now it’s completely gone. Gone without leaving a trace. Everything’s so shifty, don’t you find? It all shifts in an instant and stuff gets lost. Lots of stuff gets lost, all the time. Maybe if I’m careful I can find my way back. Back to my original insight. The thing that sparked all this off. The key is not to thrash around too much – to try as best one can to accept one’s present circumstances without bitterness. To accept the loss of the insight.

 

Maybe it wasn’t an insight at all. Maybe it was just another reflection. A reflection of what I don’t know – a reflection of something that keeps on running away from me! All my life it’s been running away from me. I kind of want to say that what I’m chasing is a series of reflections of myself, which I don’t recognize as such. I want to say that but it’s not quite right – it’s too intellectual. That’s me trying to be clever. That’s me trying to be smart, like some kind of an idiot. Like some kind of jack-ass.

 

I suppose a better way to put it is to say that I’m chasing reflections of how things look to me when I’m looking at the world in the particular kind of a way that I am looking at it. The particular distorted kind of a way of looking at the world that is my way. Everything I see is filtered through this central invisibly-distorted lens and the ‘distortion’ in question is due to some kind of nameless accident that befell me somewhere along the way. The accident that created my particular viewpoint is responsible for the way I see things, it’s responsible for my viewpoint. It’s responsible for me, really…

 

It’s a laugh isn’t it. What a laugh! It is pure hysterical, if only I could see it. Which usually I can’t. The way I see the world is as I have said the result of some random accident that I have no way of knowing about – naturally I have no way of knowing about it since it has become my way of seeing everything! Like I say, there’s humour there for sure. The accident has become me. Hysterical, isn’t it?

 

What I am actually chasing after is of course reality. What else would I be looking for? What else would anyone be looking for? What wouldn’t I give for a little bit of reality? Just the tiniest little morsel of it. The merest crumb of it would go such a long way. Would make such a difference. All the difference in the world in fact. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. I can’t even imagine the difference that a little tiny bit of reality would be make…

 

Reality is fractured and all I get to see are upside-down hallucinatory images reflected in the distorted mirror of my mind. Reality has been diffracted – it has been scattered here and there, reflected crazily by the spinning disco ball which is my accidentally-acquired way of seeing the world. And all I can do in this situation is to go on chasing after the little shards of coloured light as they track merrily over the floor and up the walls and across the ceiling. The little bits of fractured reality that only seem to be there because I’m seeing everything in a back-to-front way. Really none of this is happening at all – it’s all just my own private trip. A kind of a way of passing the time, only time doesn’t exist either, any more than I do, not really, and so where does that leave me?

 

 

Image: “Cultural Bias” by Eugenia Loli.

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *