MIRROR
“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”
― Vladimir Nabokov
The Mirror presents figures who share the same ego functions, yet place different emphases on them. These others are seen to function autonomously and with their own voice, beyond the intentional control and oversight of an “I”. Moreover, “dialogues” within the self can take place wholly unconsciously and non-discursively through non-conceptual modes of expression that reflect the deep archetypal background of embodied life, which opens the way to an undifferentiated and sometimes many otherness that goes beyond relationship to a specific other.
When the “inner other” becomes foregrounded in experience as a participant in dialogue, it is invariably projected in an act of imagination that can never fully capture the unknown otherness that it expresses. While these imaginative constructions do not constitute discursive knowledge in any obvious sense, they do function to express, perform and exhibit our ongoing self-understanding in endlessly creative ways.
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