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Mirror, Mirror in the Text,
Which Myself Will I See Next?

Sante Matteo

I receive frequent emails from Academia.edu that inform me that a prominent scholar has read or cited one of the essays I have posted on the Academia site. To have access to the citation and to find out who else has been devouring and regurgitating my published work, I would have to upgrade to a premium account for a fee.  

I’m a retired professor and no longer need to keep tilling in the publish-or-perish field of academe, nor to keep up on who is publishing what, where; nor, for purposes of status, promotions, or salary, do I need to be concerned about how my own publications are faring in the  marketplace of academic scholarship.  

Furthermore, though retired from my academic appointment, I’m not yet retired from being a cheapskate. And so, I have resisted the constant barrage of enticements to cough up the dough to feed my vanity by finding out who is reading and citing my work and how they’re reacting to it.  

Why, then, you might well ask, do I continue to submit myself to this barrage and not  simply unsubscribe from the email feed? In addition to laziness, it must also be because, though retired from the job, I am still hooked on the lure of professional vanity that came packaged with the job, and I am still flattered and pleased to see the names of scholars pop up on my computer screen as fans of my work. 

But, who says they’re “fans”? What if those scholars are citing my essays to criticize, contradict, or dismiss them? What if they’ve come to bury Sante, not to praise him? Then, I’d be spending money to find out that my ideas have been trashed. Who would want that?

In any case, for who-knows-what reason, I’ve chosen not to put a stop to the flow of these invitations but to continue to wade through the daily inundation and to peek at the names mentioned before deleting. 

Today, the scholar’s name that was dangled to entice me was particularly intriguing. It truly is the name of a singularly eminent scholar in my field—if my field is understood to be a field of one. 

This is what the email said: 

ACADEMIA 

Dear Sante, 

“Matteo, Sante” was cited by “Sante Matteo”. 

View your mentions with 50% off Academia Premium when you upgrade in the next two days. 

In addition to eliciting a chuckle or two, this “revelation” also sparked some whimsical musings about what the right-to-left-named me had to say about the left-to-right-named me. If the two versions of my name are mirror images of each other, with left and right changing sides, are my published thoughts and ideas, some written by “Sante Matteo” and others by “Matteo,  Sante,” also mirrored reflections: similar yet opposite, reversible? 

Mirror, mirror of my name, is one different or the same? 

I posted the email on Facebook (without the long preamble or the coda I’ve added here) mostly for its amusement value. It elicited some interesting reactions, which in turn prompted replies and more musings and reflections on my part. The following is an edited compilation of comments and questions from Facebook “friends” (with numbers substituted for names) followed by my replies to each, and in some cases, with follow-up comments and replies:  

Friend 1: Ah, Academia! 

Reply: An offer that’s hard to refuse: “Here, Narcissus, look into this pool! You’ll love what you see.” 

Friend 2: That’s pretty prominent, I’d say!!! 

Reply: Yup, no matter how you turn it. 

Friend 3: (a fellow literary scholar and punster): Wow, cited by St. Matthew!

Reply: And to find out about Mark, Luke, and John, I’ll have to pony up the dough and upgrade, I guess. 

Friend 3: It’s all a new testament to your critical abilities. 

Reply: Now, you have me worried. Think of what happened to that other “critic” to  whom you allude, whose critical abilities were evangelized. The risk in our field of academic  literary scholarship is double: “Publish or perish!” if you don’t publish enough, and its mirror  double: “Publish AND perish!” if your publications gain enough attention to shake things up in  your field, in which case you end up getting metaphorically crucified by both old-school and  new-school critics and theorists who preach a different hermeneutical catechism. 

Friend 4: You never know what you might have said about your own work!

Reply: Good point! I never know what I might have said about anything. It might be worth the upgrade to find out. But I’d only forget again. 

Friend 5: AI will replace us! 

Reply: Yes, soon I will surely get an email that will say “Matteo, Sante”–or “Sante Matteo” or whatever it’s calling me then–cited by “AI.” And if I go on to use AI, myself (whatever my “self” is, if there is such an entity), to generate my texts, then AI will also be citing itself, so that a future message will read: “Intelligence, Artificial” cited by “Artificial Intelligence”; or more colloquially and economically: “I, A” cited by “AI.” 

Friend 6: (also a literary scholar): There is a biology scholar on Academia who has a name very similar to mine. I constantly have emails like: “Did you write this paper on this deadly virus?”

Reply: I’ve sometimes received similar inquiries from Academia, but not often, probably because my name is unusual, maybe unique. So, the only person with whom I’m likely to be readily confused is myself; or more accurately, the name with which mine is apt to be confused is my own. 

Friend 7: Watch it! You’ll get accused of plagiarism. 

Reply: Good warning, thanks! But, if so, couldn’t I just claim that it was the other guy who plagiarized me? 

Friend 8: Was your comment about yourself positive?

Reply: I don’t know; I didn’t pay to upgrade and find out. But I suspect not. If I was being objective, it wouldn’t be very positive. 

On the other hand, if written by my alter ego—that reversed image of me in the mirror that confuses right and left (like the reversed first name and last name in the email—who knows?) “Sante Matteo” and “Matteo, Sante” might well have opposing views about things: one a leftist, the other a rightist.  

Doesn’t a reversal of polarity always lurk as a possibility (even for the Earth’s electromagnetic field that has shifted every epochal now and then)? What is positive for some is negative for others; what is positive here and now can become negative in other places and times. 

Friend 9: Are they trying to figure out a way to plagiarize and not get caught? Watch out for ChatGPT! No one has to write about anything that has already been published. Just give it to ChatGPT, and it will rewrite it for you! Very soon people won’t have to think at all because AI will have taken over our thinking for us. 

Reply: Indeed, it is truly amazing how fast it works and how convincing the results can  be, as if written with great expertise. When I tried it out, it produced texts that seemed to have  been written by experts who know much more about the topic than I could ever hope to know.  

Now that you bring it up, I suspect that ChatGPT generates those emails I get from Academia, and from who knows how many other sources: a surging wellspring from which we  will all be imbibing before long, I expect.

It’s: Goodbye, reality, it was nice knowing you! (Well, if truth be told, it was and is not always so “nice” to know reality these days; sometimes, it is “nicer” and tempting to look away and ignore it.) And: Hello, brave new world! (Or is it: Alas, beware of the baffling new world?) 

I wonder if it’s this forced technological and cognitive migration we are facing into a new  kind of reality, toward a new virtual world, which has so many of us spooked about the actual  migration of real people on our geographical borders, because we perceive their arrival through  our fear of the strange, unknowable future ushered in by new technology beyond our ken, by  ever-more extensive social media and use of AI, seeing and fearing it all as an incursion of  foreignness that threatens to violate our existential borders and disrupt our way of being  ourselves—the selves we have crafted, or that the circumstances and conditions of our place and  time have shaped. We fear that, as refugees forced to abandon reality as we now know it, we won’t know how to interact with others that we will encounter in a new reality. Our (justifiable?)  fear is that we and our community will no longer be recognizable, neither individually nor collectively, when we look in our mental existential mirror. 

But, hey, perhaps “AI” will fashion a brand-new mirror to reflect our new identity—and  “I, A” will cite “AI” and spread the good news: the new testament of human identity. 

Friend 10: Okay, it’s “TELL THE TRUTH” time: Will the real you please stand up?

Reply: That’s easier asked than done! Is there a “real” me? Or a “real” you? Didn’t Pirandello point out that each of us has one identity, many identities, and, therefore, no fixed identity? 

Friend 10: Yes, unless it’s more accurate to attribute that view to Vitangelo Moscarda, the main character and narrator of Pirandello’s last novel, Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No One, and a Hundred Thousand). He’s the one who comes to that realization in front of our eyes.

Reply: Yes, and he eventually ends up in an asylum (as did Pirandello’s wife in “real” life), which might be where I’m headed. 

In any case, applying the formula to me, the deduction would be that: 

I am one: In my own mind, I am and remain one and the same individual at all times and in all places. 

I am many (even if not quite 100,000): Everyone who has dealt with me in different situations has a distinct idea of who and what I am, and they all think that they “know” me. What’s more, in their presence or whenever interacting with them in any way, even by phone or by writing, I perceive myself and behave somewhat differently with each one, seeing myself  partly through their eyes and acting out a role partly scripted by them. 

I am no one: As both one and many, I’m neither a steadfast and permanent “one” nor a set number of “many.” My identity is in constant flux, dangling between the “self” I think I am and the “self” that circumstances, relationships, obligations, and situations force “me” to be or to pretend to be. 

Or, as Pirandello’s Six Characters, who were searching for an Author to “flesh out” their story, pointed out to the actors who were trying to interpret them on the stage, it was they, the  fictional characters, who were “real,” not the living actors. Living people change their demeanor, behavior, attitudes, ideas, and beliefs all the time, whereas fictional characters remain constant as  they were written on the page, always performing the same actions and repeating the same  words. Living people never know what they’re going to say or do. Interpretations of what the fictional characters and their stories represent do change over time, not because the characters have changed, however, but rather because the interpreters, the live readers or spectators (and especially those who profess to be critics, scholars, and theorists) have changed what they’re  looking for and how to look for it. 

So, if the “real” me is to stand up, wouldn’t it mean that I’ve become a fictional  character? And maybe I have. Maybe anyone who publishes texts creates a persona that becomes  fixed, more stationary, and less multi-faceted than the living author who continues to think,  doubt, question, debate, and “change” his or her mind. If my mind is changeable and changing,  how can the “real me” stand up? 

Friend 10: I suppose that you would have to stand up once, never, and a hundred  thousand times. 

Reply: That sort of sounds like what I do anyway. And now that you’ve planted that  image in my brain, all that sitting and standing also brings to mind the image of rows of fans doing a rolling “wave” from one side of the stadium to the other.  

And for some even less fathomable reason, other than just being propelled aimlessly  along my own wave of thought, that image in turn reminds me of the so-called “wave theory” of human existence that has been rippling through scientific currents. 

Echoing the Pirandellian (or Moscardian if you will) notion of constant existential flux,  the “wave” hypothesis is that we exist and go through space and time as waves, not fixed objects.  As material entities, our bodies are mobile, changing, dynamic mechanisms made up of moving  parts that are in flux and always in the process of regeneration. Our somatic cells continuously mutate and replicate. By the ceaseless process of splitting, the life of one cell ends, and the life of  two new cells begins and will in turn end when those cells divide, over and over. Ending  generates a new beginning, but as a process of continuation, not of starting over ex nihilo.

So, if we don’t persist materially through time and space, what is it that keeps our identity  intact (more or less)? The answer: waves. 

A wave is a force, a form of energy, not a material entity. It acts on matter. Waves go  through water or air or other substances, forcing water and air molecules to shift and move, to  bump into or interact with other molecules and cause some to move in the same direction. Once a  wave has passed through them, most of the molecules don’t keep going along with the wave but  remain more or less where they were before, surrounded by the same neighbors, in the same  environment, albeit altered to some degree, depending on the measure of the force of the passing  of the wave. In other words, the water through which a wave has passed is both the same as it  was before and yet different: still anchored within a certain amount of continuity with its past,  but also modified and renewed by a certain amount of change in its makeup, its position, and its  surrounding circumstances. 

And that’s how it works for us, doesn’t it? A body made of particles that keep changing  without becoming completely unmoored from the body’s past states, on which ongoing experiences and conditions act as waves, some fairly placid, others tumultuous, which push us in  various directions and reposition us without unmooring us completely from previous physical and psychological states. We change and remain more or less the same. 

Friend 10: So, you think these scientists got their ideas from watching or reading Six  Characters in Search of an Author in high school or college? 

Reply: That could be. But, it wasn’t just Pirandello who was Pirandellian at the time.  The science of Pirandello’s time resonated with congruent versions of his relativistic views of  human existence.

From a professional perspective, as a writer, Pirandello was responding to the views and  practices of previous writers, inluding the verismo (truthism?) of his fellow Sicilian Giovanni  Verga, itself a manifestation of the “wave” of “realism” prevalent in late 19^th-century European  literature, which claimed to represent “reality” by looking at things “objectively.” 

From a wider perspective, Pirandello’s thought and writing were swept up in the “wave” of “relativism” that was coursing through other segments of society: art, politics, philosophy, and  science. Albert Einstein published his essay on “General Relativity” in 1915. Sigmund Freud  published his Introduction to Psychoanalysis in 1916-17. Both their approaches, like  Pirandello’s, relied on looking beyond or below the surface of “things” to uncover hidden forces  that acted on “objects” and interacted with other forces to determine a shifting “reality,” never  static and fixed; always fluctuating and “relative.” 

Friend 10: Oh, yeah, of course, I see it now: Freud’s script featuring Id, Ego, and  Superego, as played by the Three Stooges, acting out the plot of E = MC²by throwing pies in  everybody’s face, thus showing clearly, albeit not cleanly, how energy and matter interact and  can be exchanged. 

Reply: That’s funny. But you know, now that you mention it, even if only to make it  sound absurd, you do make me realize that, yes, in their own way, the Stooges, along with the  Marx Brothers and other performers and entertainers, did reflect the shift of the zeitgeist from  realism and positivism to impressionism and relativism: the Stooges focusing on physical flux  and conversion to chaotic energy, and the Marx boys working on verbal (con)fusion and  relativity. 

By the way, the thought that Freud’s ideas thus came to be “reflected” in the popular  arena of spectacle and entertainment brings back to mind the mirror image suggested by the reversal of my name in the email. And that’s not only because of the double meaning of the word  “reflect,” but because of the anecdote involving a mirror that Freud, himself, recounts in a  footnote in his 1919 essay on Unheimlich (The Uncanny). 

He says that, on a train, he was surprised and upset to see an unexpected, unwelcome, and  unpleasant-looking intruder enter into his compartment, and then realized that he was looking at  himself in a mirror. That momentary slip or rupture of self-identity caused him to experience the  feeling of unheimlich (usually translated, or rather approximated, as “the uncanny”): a feeling of  being out of place, and yet feeling that way in the very place where he was most at home, with  himself, somehow feeling not at home in his own self. It was by seeing himself from the  outside—and only seeing the outside of himself, as others saw him—that he felt alienated from  himself. 

Friend 10: Consider, though, that the body he saw in the mirror wasn’t precisely the  same as what others saw when looking at him, because, for him, the image was reversed. What  they saw as his right side, he saw as his left side. 

The difference may seem insignificant, but is it? Consider all the meanings that we attach  to the word “right,” most of them positive, likely because most people are right-handed, and we  assume that to be “normal” and “correct,” whereas “left” tends to have negative connotations:  e.g. a left-handed compliment; having two left feet; to be gauche, French for “left,” meaning to  be clumsy, inept. “Sinister” comes from the Latin word for “left” (in Italian, “left” is sinistro);  “Dextrous” come from Latin for “right.” The English word “left” comes from an Old English word meaning “weak.” In societies that read from left to right, is rightward motion seen as  “normal” and leftward motion as “abnormal” and somehow threatening? In other words, “switching sides” might also have consequences, some obvious, others less so, in what we  perceive and how we perceive it. 

Reply: Mirror, mirror on the train, did you split my self in twain? 

You might add to your qualification that Freud’s sense of alienation in that episode on the  train was also temporary and fleeting (like the life of a cell). He almost immediately realized that he was looking in a mirror and that the unpleasant figure he had glimpsed with some revulsion was actually his own reflection, at which point he quickly readjusted his perception, not only to  re-establish the relationship between right and left but also to reset the focus of his perception from the outside to the inside. 

Friend 10: Still, the question remains: Which was more “real”: the familiar image of  himself he saw and kept filed in his mind or the one he unexpectedly saw in the mirror and  initially didn’t recognize? And, if the real Sigmund was the one in the mirror rather than the one  in his mind, which mirror image was more accurate: the one he saw each morning in his  bathroom when he purposefully looked in a mirror and was prepared and predisposed to find  what he expected to see, or the image he unexpectedly saw by accident, when his  preconditioning filters had not been deployed and his reaction was not influenced by his  protective prejudices and biases? 

Reply: Mirror, mirror on the wall, are you the truest self of all? 
Mirror, mirror in my mind, are you the self who is most kind? 
Mirror, mirror on the page, are you the self I should engage? 

Are those legitimate questions? Or rather, can any of them have a legitimate, accurate,  and incontrovertible answer? 

At the same time that Sigmund, Albert, and Luigi were mulling over and articulating their  ideas in their respective fields, Max Planck was also playing and practicing on the sidelines,  ready to try out another game. The nascent field of quantum mechanics was in the process of  formulating the theory that even in physics, “either-or questions” of that kind are misleading.  Phenomena, conditions, and relationships among particles and fields of energy entail a “both and” approach, with all elements quantumly entangled. 

Perhaps a similar entanglement applies to the various elements that comprise selfhood, in  which case the “real” me, following the lead of Schrodinger’s cat who could be both dead and  alive at the same time, could simultaneously stand up and stay seated. The one called “Sante  Matteo” is no more or less “real” than the one called “Matteo, Sante”; and either, both, or neither one can definitively be labeled as the “real” one. 

Mirror, mirror in the quanta, are there no selves that I can count on? 

Who knows? 

Unknown Commenter: Sorry for butting into this pretty bizarre conversation—kind of  interesting and amusing at the beginning, but rather ponderous and obtuse toward the end—but,  speaking of getting entangled, how did you (and we, the undaunted and possibly demented few who have kept reading this far) end up getting tangled up in this long, rambling, convoluted concatenation of reflections? 

—Wait, did I just write “reflections”? Heck, now you even have me, an innocent  interloper, tangled up in that mirror motif of yours that you’ve been shoving in front of us throughout this excursion: in the title, in the Freud anecdote, in the switched order of the name,  and all those discordant riffs on the Wicked Queen’s incantation in Snow White—and now that, yes, I “reflect” on it, I also wonder which mirror image came first and subsequently spawned the  other iterations: the one in Freud’s anecdote, the one Snow White’s Wicked Queen interrogates, the simple fact that the names were reversed in the email, or maybe even the Three Stooges or  Marx Brothers, since both teams had skits in which one of them pretends to be a reflection of  another in a mirror, which seems to be a set piece in comedy sketches of stage and screen at the  time? 

Anyway, as I started out to say before interrupting myself (by looking in the rearview  mirror?), it seems that at a certain point, the series of quoted comments and replies took a weird  turn onto a different track, from light-hearted banter to heavy-handed blather. I think the switch  happened after the comment of “Friend no. 10,” which, on re-reading, now seems to have been formulated post hoc to justify the increasingly tedious and pretentious disquisition that follows.  

So, tell the truth … Oh no, there I go again, parroting what you’ve written before I  realize that I’m doing it; in this case, your “TELL THE TRUTH” above. Anyway, please do tell  me: Was there really a “Friend 10” or was that comment simply made up by you as a pretext to  launch into the pseudo-philosophical discussion that follows? 

Reply: Ah, found out and exposed! You, whoever you be, have stumbled on the truth; or  very perceptively uncovered it. The first nine comments or questions were mostly authentic,  actually made by friends and slightly altered in some cases. My replies to those comments are  also taken from the Facebook post, in a few cases with some revisions and additions. 

But, yes, I made up and wrote the whole section after Comment 9, faking the prompt and-response format to make it look like a Platonic dialogue updated (or upgraded?) to resemble  a Facebook-like give and take. 

Mea culpa, mea culpa, it was I, only and always I, from that point onward.

Unknown: Thanks for that confession! But now that your authorship of the whole  shebang after comment no. 9 is revealed, it occurs to me that I, too, show up only at the end of  all this verbiage, which leads me to wonder: Am I real or did you make me up too? 

Reply: That sounds like an either/or question, which tempts me, after this long indoctrination in having things both ways, to translate it to a both/and hypothesis.  In the conventional sense, of course, you’re “real” if you have a flesh-and-blood  existence, and, as per the Pirandellian argument sketched out above, you would be even more “real” if you were a fictional character made up by me. 

Furthermore, you would be even more “more real”—more “realized,” in the Italian sense  of “realizzato,” made real, brought to completion or realization—than your fellow fictional  creations, the Six Characters in search of an author, because the original author who thought  them up and sketched them out never got around to finishing their story, so that they weren’t  fully “realized” and needed to find another author to complete them, or to put it another way, to “finalize” them. 

You, however, don’t need to undertake such a search because I’m all done with you.  You’re set in words for eternity. You can rest in peace. 

Unknown: Hmmm, gee, thanks . . . I think. But “I” who? Which “I” are you who is speaking now? Just so I know: Is my author “Sante Matteo” or “Matteo, Sante”? 

Academia.edu: To find out, and to qualify for a 50% discount if you act today, sign up for our  premium account!

Sante Matteo—NO! Matteo, Sante—NO!! Sante—NO!!! Matteo—YES, NO, MAYBE? Let’s just make it: I/Me: In case you’re a cheapskate, too, like me (or like both of me, or all of  the mes in me), and you don’t want to pay that premium for premium features, not even with a  discount, but you do want to waste even more time pondering the mysteries of those two monikers assigned to me and how they have affected my life and shaped me as a person, take a  look at the “autobiography” that my name, in its various guises and disguises, wrote about its  wild adventures in the migratory realm of nomadic nomenclature, as it ventured across national  and linguistic borders and dwelt in different contexts. It’s free! “Hallowed Be My Name: A  Transplant’s Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs in Translation,” in the Journal of Italian  Translation, XV.1, Spring 2020, pp. 28-50; available here: https://itamohio.lib.miamioh.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Hallowed-Name-JIT-excerpt.pdf

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Sante Matteo was born and raised in a small agricultural town in southern Italy and emigrated to the United States with his family as a child. He maintained his ties to Italy as a professor of Italian Studies. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where he resides, reminisces, and writes. Stories, poems, and memoirs have appeared in The Chaffin Journal, River River, The New Southern Fugitives, Showbear Family Circus, Bark, Ovunque Siamo, Kairos, Snapdragon, and Dime Show Review. His story “Escape from Paradise” appeared in Twelve Winters Journal, Volume I. Read Sante’s commentary on “Mirror, Mirror in the Text …”

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