by Eurydice (c) 1999
EU'S FIRST MEMORIES, tentatively titled: WHY I WRITE
In the beginning of all there was the mirror, on every side, wide open. The mirror created everything. I first opened my eyes (
or was it, its eyes?) while going through the mirror; or coming through the mirror: from my mirror view, this and the other side were identical. The mirror taught me how to talk, walk, defecate. I dressed up for it, smiled into it, wore the "fuck me" look on my face to please it. I discovered myself in the mirror: something outside of me was myself. I was always in the picture. I existed by excluding myself. My otherness was clear. And I could see behind my back. body_early_memory.html
Since then, I slept with the mirror or woke up to it. I went into it at impossible mirror times or came out of it at impossible mirror places. Living through the mirror was not a sequence, an addition, a story. I said mirror words. My breasts had a mirror smell. My words mirrored my mouth. My smell mirrored my breasts. I had mirror feelings. Great fatal passions were impossible in the mirror. Glass breaks from too much love or hate or anger. So I could not be held. In the mirror, la dolce vita lasted for ever.
Though I looked as if I didn't care about anything, I held on to my hiding place: the mirror. The mirror was not a closed erect system. It was a river. When I looked into it for over a second, I no longer recognized myself. I never focused. I was exempt from volume.
So I lived in continuous orgasm. The mirror invented foreplay and afterplay. It prolonged sex. The mirror was the source of all suspense. It could not obey. It was inconsistent. It was a revenge. A zero. Like looking into the firing squad, or into the lens.
My reflection looked at me, not at herself. The image of me didn't see what I saw. It saw what I could not see. Both my presence and my absence were announced. Each side wanted to taste the heart (the death) of the other. If I moved too close, it (or I) would float away (or drown). The mirror, like a camera, froze my eyes.
My eyes were self-contained: convex mirrors. Men desired me (or their reflection) to acknowledge (devastate) them. Men saw the mirror as real. So they lived out of place. There the mirror looked like a window. Men desired the evil eye: the gap between my flesh and my eyes. Men said: "I want to know what you are thinking." But living in the mirror was a continuous rehearsal. I felt no loss. What I saw was compelling enough to make me leave (or come) at once.
When I came, I slipped in between the two: between him and my reflection, or him and his image. It was not an assertion or an insertion. Unlike a man saying: "Am I in yet?" or "See what a Jewish cock can do?" I was open to all comers. My coming did not end the suspense. Men asked: "Did sex come before everything else in the world?" or "Don't you realize there are two sides to a couple?"
I whispered in response: "I come as if nothing has ever happened. Do you invent everything? That you see? That I am? My body is only the pretext. Some say love is impossible; or love makes everything else impossible. Others say that love is a bird or love is war or love is peace or love is a strategy with advances, expediencies, re-treats, artifices, crisis techniques, based on the exception rather than the rule. Some say love is what keeps us from degenerating into norms. And others say love is the search for the perfect mirror. We can't know if it is love that unites us or if love separates us. We can never satisfy our love, our desire to be transparent; for love se-cretes a thick fog independently from the lovers, that shrouds every-thing. Love likes to pose riddles that cannot be solved, to inhabit worlds that cannot be mapped. So when choosing a mirror, remember that the mirror will outlast your presence. The mirror cannot see you."
I, for one (or two), never knew where I was. I lived in glass. I could not be distinguished from the screen. I was not transfixed. I hovered beyond. I was constantly seen. But because I had always been secretive, and because no one had ever discovered me, I thought it sufficed to cross into the rippling glass and pretend to disappear.
Today, I broke the mirror. I didn't know I could.
