The old myth of the man who becomes another man or woman,
who is translocated into some alien skin, muscle and sensory apparatus, is
familiar to us all. My feeling is that I am that man – that this is an accurate
account of growing up.
Try as I may, I can remember many things about my childhood,
but not my stature, not what it felt like to be, say, four feet high. My
carriage, my vehicle, was beyond me. I look at the world from my present height
and can imagine no other way of looking at the world – yet I know I was not always
like this.
This lack of a certain external visual sense of myself
imposes itself on other bits of my quotidien. I look at myself in the mirror, I
take selfies, but my self never seems completely wedded to my reflection, my
selfie. In dreams, as they are reconstructed in movies, the dreamers see
themselves: but this has never happened to me. I am, in dreams, deeply in
myself. The camera never moves out, never moves around. Roger hiding in a
closet while burglars are ransacking the house – a dream I have had a number of
times – is always the self sealed in the closet, my sensory outlets taking in
the scene as I normally do, and never a
picture of the self in the closet, a camera, as it were, rolling around and
filming me.
In this sense, my mirror phase is always actually a hole phase.
I still don’t entirely identify with the tenement. I wonder if movie stars, who
have their image imposed upon them professionally, dream of their own faces?
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