Im Scherbenwald – A Voyage Of I

There are few of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

• Samuel Butler, Erewhon; Or, Over The Range

To step afore a mirror is as if one steps afore one's maker; without our reflection we wouldn't know what we are to others, perhaps not even what we are to ourselves. But as we ruminate further on what a mirror is and what it does we uncover that it is but a refugium of a time capsule. As instant as light speed may seem, it still delivers but a speck of a very recent past. And such is its introspective counterpart – self-reflection – for neural firing as much abides the confining nigh-instancy of light speed as our eyesight does.

But as we step into the realm of the internal we are not met with a mirror in its completeness. We traverse an urwald, with lakelets and hills, with wildlife and dense flora – humid, hot, ill-suited for its human visitor. As we survey our surroundings we uncover that it is not lush leaves that surround us – it is ourselves; each leaf is but a shard of a mirror, reflecting but a segment of what comprises us. We can attempt to unravel the full picture but by approximation, by arranging the puzzle pieces; doing so we are subject to our internal dead angle though. Were we to take in multiple shards at once we are met with a mosaïque of fragments of self, the individual shards being but ill-fitted to each other. Were we to plug the mirror fragments we would alter their perspective, fracturing the Scherbenwald to the end of self-completion. As we win ourselves we lose our mind in that process.

What's the takeaway?
The voyage of self-discovery is a perilous one, but forsooth one that bears fruits in the end. As much as we step inward into our own psyche we step just as much outward into a foreign realm, distant from the physical, present world we reside in. Amidst this voyage we are never not "I" though, never not anyone but ourselves. As Samuel Butler correctly pinpoints in the quote, a mirror is but an extrospective tool, showing but what we are to the external world. If you wish to uncover what you are to yourself, you must traverse the stifling depths of the Scherbenwald.

Commonly a mirror shows what lies before. The contortionist sees what lies behind, the self-reducer sees what lies inside, the realist recognises it as what just was.

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