“…mirror is an illusion. Consider the individual looking back at you, condemned to perpetual left-handedness…”
~Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum.
I often walk down Southern Avenue…imagining a different time and space. It is very real to me. Suppose this was something else, suppose that was something else too. ‘Suppose’ is not a mere word. It is the beckoning of dreams, the faith of the faithless. It is the permission to imagine where your entire existence is under surveillance. It is survival. You can suppose that you did not live here and now. That, you are not reading this. That, you are a part of this.
Reality is according to perspective. The tree I face when I get off the bus is existent for me, because I see it; I understand it to be existent. I call it a tree; I know it is a tree. This is not an idea wholly out of my head. The idea is related to the philosophical idea, Solipsism.
Do I then suffer from the Solipsism Syndrome? As Wikipedia puts it “Solipsism syndrome is a state of mind in which a person begins to feel that everything is a dream and is not real.” I cannot fairly judge whether I suffer from this Syndrome, as I do not know what it is real anymore.
Everything is a symbol. A true symbol reflecting who I am, what I believe. Unknown to myself, I let people know things I am not sure are a part of me. I help people constitute an image of me. But very consciously, when in a situation I do not get much verbal cues, I try hard to understand what the other person means or believes. When I am idly sitting by the window of a slow moving bus, I try to understand the story behind every movement of a particular person. Yes I am a voyeur. I take a somewhat illogical interest in what the stranger is trying to hide, or to show. About where he belongs, about who he is. I try to construct a story out of what I know are signs, culturally embedded or otherwise. But I am not alone in this. There is Semiotics, the study of sign processes (semiosis), or of signification and communication, signs and symbols, individually and grouped in sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.
But then how much of his signs, or even mine can reflect the real me. How real am I? what is ‘real’, anyway? "Baudrillard argued that in late Twentieth Century "global" society the excess of signs and of meaning had caused an (quite paradoxical) effacement of reality" Real, for me has become a mesh of information, most of it what I have no personal proof of. I have not seen the Earth go round the Sun. I have not seen a man eat a man. I have not touched an Electric Ray. But, I know that it is real, that the Earth goes round the Sun, that man has eaten man throughout history, that the Electric Ray stings. Similarly, I also know that a Women’s Horlicks is a better health drink than Complan for a tired and stressed out woman. For, that is what is implied by what I see.
My reality, my existence is not created by me. My reality is created by a number of other people who are members of the culture industry. What I start believing through advertisements, through well meaning movies, through news papers, and books and all media entertainment networks, becomes real to me. It becomes an inseparable part of my reality. So I show the victory sign of two fingers, as Churchill did. I give a high five to my friends. These are part of my characteristics. These are part of who I am. These are part of my reality. But this reality has been constructed by the childhood images of sportspersons in their success.
Your entire life is an illusion, build by a number of other people...people believe you are a certain individual by what they read into your body language, whatever exists in your life, exists because you believe it to be real, like your relationship with your lover, your ideas etc and what is real to you, you do not know for sure if it is real in the first place. For that matter, your idea of how you look is an illusion too. Would what you see in the mirror and thus, conceive yourself to be actually stand as the real you? “…mirror is an illusion. Consider the individual looking back at you, condemned to perpetual left-handedness…” ~Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum.
~Shrirupa Sengupta
