Meers...

I've read that Queen Elizabeth I had two phobias: snow and mirrors, which makes me like her even more. For one thing, the two go together well: the fake ice of the mirror and the cold bleachy snow. They're also pretty classy for phobias when the more common types are bugs, elevators, and vomit. Her mirror phobia intrigues me, though, since Elizabeth was known to be vain. However, given the cosmetics of the time: white lead, vermillion, and carbon, coupled with court aesthetics: small boobs, bad teeth, plucked hairline, and half-moon eyebrows, I imagine a glance in the mirror could be pretty startling, even at the best of times.

When I came to Texas as a painting instructor, I told my beginning classes to add a mirror to their supplies, since I was going to assign a self-portrait. They all favored me with that white-eyed zombie stare, until one was brave enough to say, "You mean a meer?" "A what?" I asked. "A meer," the girl said insistently, "a meer, a meer, a meer," until I understood. So, yes, a meer for that old classic: the self-portrait. Although I was an abstract painter and not likely to rip off the odd self-portrait, I kept a meer in my studio, hanging in a little alcove. While painting, often I would get into such an out-of-body state, I'd have to check out my reflection to remember what I looked like.

At my grad school, over in the performance art department , the director was completely obsessed with meers. He dragged his students all over the map so they could assist in his pieces. These consisted of naked people holding chunks of meer next to their flabby bits, thus making two flabby bits. Besides feeling sorry for his goose-pimply students, I thought it was a dopey idea, even after he published a scholarly monograph. I much preferred the work of his student and personal hot ticket, Ana Mendieta, who traipsed all over Iowa setting up mass-murder scenes made of torn clothing, the single eloquent shoe, a scrap of paper full of incoherent ravings, and everything decorated with lashings of cow blood. A walk in the dullsville landscape outside Iowa City could be pretty zippy, if you stumbled into one of Ana's scenes unawares.

After grad school, I rented a place, generically known all over town as The Pit. To spruce it up, I installed a mirrored wall and then spent the next month jumping out of my skin, because I'd think there was someone else in The Pit with me. But I discovered something. We don't come upon mirrors unaware. When we do, our encounters with our reflection are generally spooky, showing us either a quick shadowy figure or someone too old and/or fat to be recognizable. That's one reason the narcissist fascinates us, as he stares into the pool, in love with his twin mirrored self. As a vice, self-love must take enormous awareness and cool preparation so the encounter never surprises.

I realized, after the John Edwards debacle, that I was haunted with that video of him combing his hair, looking in the mirror, seemingly pleased. And then, much later, too late really, I thought of him confessing to narcissism, as though it had come upon him unawares, like a flukish case of the measles.

But that's the thing about meers. When we look into them, we already have a very good idea of what we'll see.

And, we already know we'll like it.