Selfies and The Dangers of Self-Regard

 I have taken only one selfie - and it was to show where I was on the Ball State campus. I have never considered mine a photogenic face; it is too pale, too pudgy, too obviously the image of stupidity. Yes, there is a photo attached to this blog. That is so you can know I am human and that the human behind all these words does look a fool.

I did not grow up with the idea connecting mirrors with death. I ran that across reading one of the Russians. I understood it when I saw it, but it still felt too much the superstition.

Mirrors and death turn up in Amit Majmudar 's Stop Looking at Yourself: On the Dangers of Mirrors and Selfies, which does record the history of the capturing of the human image and our recording of those images. Much is made of its dangers. Considering my recent history, I have never been consumed with fascination by photographs - they are a record, a dead thing, their execution more interesting than their subject matter. The essay points out problems I did not think of, including:

We were not meant to look at ourselves too closely or too often. By not meant I mean not designed, psychologically, spiritually. We are not designed to endure a superabundance of sugar, either. The sugar doesn’t stop tasting good. It keeps tasting good even after it’s started killing you. What the founder of Facebook discovered was the same thing the founder of OnlyFans discovered: Given a chance, people will create and surrender their own images, eagerly. All is vanity. Scroll to the biographical note, glance at the back cover of my books. There it is, unaware of the irony, smiling blandly out at you, wanting your approval: the author photograph.

It seems to me the injunction to examine one's life is not to examine one's images but one's actions. Selfies would then lead us aware from considering our ideas and their subsequent actions and the moral qualities of those ideas and actions. Which seems to fit with what I see and hear of our world: more attuned to the noise and the image than to the idea and its meaning.

sch 12/30/2023