Excerpts from Gnome
“Joy makes us hurry from the house; pain makes us enter it. Joy makes us open the window; pain makes us close it.”[1] On the operating table, in the immediate aftermath of a C-section, joy and pain meet on the threshold. My wife grimaces at me, a smile like a laceration, palindrome of pain and joy. She shivers from the recent schism. Our son in the nursery is a nutmeat. His face has not yet arrived. His cry is all the shape of a life to come. His shock is our reflection.
He’s a hafu, as they call them: in the street, on the train platforms, Japanese mothers abandon their own babies to ogle ours: his face a fusion of hemispheres, race confused with ratio.
Birth-faces are barely there, because the body is all face; and because we’re all expression, and the most general expression of the present moment. Everything’s touch. Even sight and sound are forms of touch. The senses of projection are flush with the skin, and the world is all horizon of touch. The touch is from all degrees of the sphere that projects us: “We are changed into the same image from glory to glory.”[2]
Chiefly a myopia links soul to body. A shadow will grow toward the person, will age with him or her, shorten or lengthen.
Nothing real but the profile, countenance, aria, impression; shadow or scar. The face general within the landscape, formed by a complex series of greatly interdependent steps, genetic and environmental; facial shape the crest of ectomesenchymal flow, certain finished aspects, as remarkable as any simpler creature living on its own: the vermilion of the upper lip a species to itself; the nasal septum, the helix of the ear; lacrimal caruncle, semilunar fold….there are places in the face stranger than the surface of another world.
In evolution the face becomes more mobile, more expressive. The eyes move forward, making the depth of the world with their biconjugate workings. This is reach, the hand of the mind.
Seeing releases spirit, suffuses air with image: echoes of face, the reverberations back and forward, around, face-dance fading around where you are. “The life of a man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides to new and larger circles, and that without end.”[3] There are concentric faces, faces that reach to halo and rescind to pigment; faces that put all into one profile, then jostle back into the jaw or brow, moles placed with astronomical precision.
The face of the waters: a face only to the eye of God. We know it’s a face, though we can’t see it. We’re traveling through its expressions, historical; flux chaotic at our level, earth-emotion: infinite tears, finite to the God above. The face came from this fishiness; and from the ground-grubbing, soil-sifting, continental grimacing.
The mirror’s an oasis. But you’re the desert, scratching at the boundary. In the mirror the face is a breath from the face, continuous exhalation: the framed space an aquarium for the eyes, or rather for their glancing. But the framed space is centered. It locks the eyes to their reflection, pastes them back on themselves. Something else floats in that no-space, a melancholium, a mood just one shade too dark for seeing; but it makes us believe it’s a part of us, that it swims in the brain.
Sometimes you can look in the mirror and catch the slightest glimpse of another animal: a pure stare, but not direct; centripetal creatures, like us, then centrifugal ones, beings of different worlds, with boundaries inside rather than out. They aren’t visible in the mirror, but sometimes they leave a mark: the bite of conscience, or the profile just slightly pried from its hinge before slamming shut again.
A journey, saccadic around the room-face, wearing the frame like shoulders (shoulders, where the body thinks of the head and the head the body; axle, shrug-morals, shouldness), the grim around speculum. No ellipses live in the mirror-world; everything’s connected with semicolons, bones into sockets, anchor-points, pendulums swinging at atom-level the fluid content of all solid things: everything in a mirror is pendulous: hung out of the way, waiting for a fall, for the lights to go out.
The me in rhyme with the I spirals out of the image in the glass, the face that tucks abashment just slightly into the sides of the mouth and the torsion of eyelids…ellipses, tiny toes, stepping away from the scene: the colon a pair of eyes looking deeper into the mirror, finding it not possible. That period is just what it is: such. Not a blink, but a breath-stop, one of the many emptinesses one must step over walking through the atoms. Most of us try to live as long as we can by the comma, our oar! Sculls via exclamation, hooks onto the pier, via this ?, though it suddenly slips from our grip, being trick-handled, for there’s no hook into the world – only dashes forward/leaps back over a slanted board, stone-hoppings, stretchings for the post before the boat slips too far out, and the still water stares up with that single enchantment, a face, your face, and all the world reveals itself to be a mirror, mirror without frame, a mirror with entrances and exits at every point of contact.
In worlds a few degrees off from our own, mirroring is more than a matter of vision. Even our own world was made by reversals at the level of the atom; however, we’ve scaffolded a reality beyond that, scrimmed our lives behind it.
To keep from falling to a point, and yet to be singular. Because the mirror’s an eye equal to its point of focal disappearance: “looked at, the mirrors close their eyes….”[4] Imagine the symphysis of face and mirror. Yes, it’s close enough to reality – but take it a step further: the cyborg, the specular human: not a projection! No, the symphytic node, a kind of being in itself – a fusion and status – a power of denying power to its opposite neighbors – creates the child that recognizes the other in a mirror sooner than he recognizes himself. This is the opposite of Narcissus: not Echo, but something altogether beyond myth.
[1] Paolo Mantegazza
[2] I Cor. 3:18
[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson
[4] James Merrill
Bio:
Robert Lunday has one published book, Mad Flights, from Ashland Poetry Press. Recent work is in Field, Poet Lore, Drunken Boat, Pank, and elsewhere. He lives on a small horse farm in central Texas.