Mirror Worlds
Comments: 10
Mark Bernstein mentioned something recently —
In his new novel, Pattern Recognition, William Gibson calls London the mirror world. Things here are just like home – but not quite. Cars come from unexpected places, doors open the wrong way, familiar things have strange names, and everything tastes a little strange.
— which reminded me of a phenomenon I’d been meaning to mention for a while. It’s a kind of mirror world phenomenon, I suppose, but based on similarities (picking up on the differences seems kind of obvious — should we expect everything to be the same on the other side of the planet?).
I was also reminded of it a few days ago after seeing the Japanese James Spader (for whom I may have subconsciously been on the lookout after recently seeing a picture of the real James Spader for the first time in years — apparently he’s playing Daniel Ellsberg in a new movie about the Pentagon papers).
I guess we have to call this phenomenon something like physiognomic templating. I occasionally see Japanese people who don’t just bear a resemblance to someone I know back in Australia, they appear to have been cast from the same mould. The resemblance is so profound — involving three or more facial features (and it’s a phenomenon that makes you realise just how many facial features each of us have: “nose,” “eyes,” “mouth” &c are really just collective nouns for whole subsets of identity-bestowing featurelettes that we don’t usually deign to name individually) — that the two people would seem to have been created from the same template (which, of course, genetically is pretty much how it happens anyway, but work with me here).
Has anyone else noticed this when visiting other countries? I’m sure there’s a perfectly pedestrian explanation for it and that it’s not nearly as exciting as I’m making out, but the fact that much more than a simple “A resembles B” relationship is apparently being expressed gives it at least an interesting hint of the mirror-worldly.
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Posted to Other Places • 2003.03.29 (Sat) • 22:59
Comments
Posted by niji 2003.03.30, 00:16
interesting post. i think that it is the other way around. it is us who use templates to view the world and its phenomina. we seek out similiarity, and try to creat it even when it is not there. seeing the world through a limited number of familiar patterns allows us to “make sense of it all”; diversity is threatening in all its complications. we can not process it, so we refuse to recognize the myriad differences. it is more comforting and easy that way.
i remember the chairman of my japanese program telling me: expect differences, and beware of what you think are similiarities. she was right.
Posted by MacDara 2003.03.30, 01:42
this idea that niji brings up about personal templates through which we experience various phenomena reminds me of my difficulties reading Immanuel Kant, until i realised what he was saying about the a priori was in fact strikingly analogous to the concept of markup languages: that we have an a priori templates that come as part of the package of being human (what he calls ‘categories’), but they doesn’t come into play until we have a posteriori content to fill them. (it’s explored most interestingly in both the critique of pure reason and the prolegomena, not that one would have much fun or luck reading them without annotations.)
Posted by Ashley 2003.03.30, 03:49
When I lived in Japan I do remember thinking of the Japanese face and how many faces there were… exactly. I didn’t necessarily compare them to people I knew in the states, but instead searched for the similarity in faces and broke it down to about 32. I would see people who were completely unrelated who looked quite similar.
This topic is so fascinating. Niji’s idea of having a personal template based on our own experiences, then attempting to match up new experiences with what we already know.
I did that with the Japanese language. ‘oaiso’ I thought was… ‘kawaiiso’ because I didn’t have the ear experience to hear the new phrase ‘oaiso’. Since I didn’t know what the word was, I thought it was another Japanese “save face” expression meant to say… “Oh, so sad, you are leaving us now. You must pay your bill and we were having so much fun while you were here.” There are others like ‘tasukomarimashita’ I thought… ‘task (english task to [do something]) owarimashita’ “My task is finished!”.
I’m in artschool now and am painting using oils. Currently doing quite a few portraits and the face is one of the harder things to paint. The subtleties and use of value to create certain shades or folds on the face is something I am learning to master. Have you ever noticed in some paintings that the paint and strokes seem so disconnected then when you stand a few feet away from the painting the image is perfectly clear with all of the elements in place. Our eyes (mind) just blurs what is necessary together to create a recognizable image based on what we’ve experienced up to that point.
The idea of a ‘mirrored world’ is quite a fascinating idea. Even here in Portland, Oregon it feels like a mirrored world compared to Los Angeles, California or even Fukuoka, Japan. It’s green like in Japan. Some of the roads here are narrow like in Japan. The people here seem like the American-like doppledanger of the Japanese in the most southern region.
I probably think this, based on what my perceptions can narrowly accept based on a few experiences.
Well.. time to stop typing and eat some breakfast.
Great topic.
Respectfully,
Ashley
Posted by Jean 2003.03.30, 13:28
I’ve been playing that game for years, spotting Japanese clones of my friends or people I know from back home (Canada). I’m sometimes quite amazed at what I see.
Posted by jh 2003.03.30, 17:47
Niji —-
beware of what you think are similiarities.
That’s good! There’s a lot of mileage in that thought.
MacDara —-
[templates don’t] come into play until we have a posteriori content to fill them
Similar to Niji’s point, and going a long way to explain why the faces of close friends trigger the effect (rather than the faces of less familiar acquaintances or, say, celebrities —- although this happens, too).
Ashley —-
Our eyes (mind) just blurs what is necessary together to create a recognizable image based on what we’ve experienced up to that point.
I do ultimately think I’m imposing rather than identifying order, but the strength of the resemblances is striking nonetheless. I don’t think I did a good job of explaining why it seems like so much more than a simple Rorshach moment when it happens. It’s almost like the similarities are too deep —- structural rather than glancing.
I’m guessing this is the amazement that Jean mentions: some people don’t resemble friends, they are those friends, just born thousand of miles away.
Posted by Curmudgeon 2003.03.30, 22:42
After reading Antipixel this morning, I went to the local 7-11 as usual to pick up an English newspaper. Entering the store as I was leaving was the Taiwanese Harry Dean Stanton - same well-weathered face, and dressed in a flannel shirt and blue jeans. Now I’m wondering who I’ll be seeing next.
Posted by Ashley 2003.03.31, 04:17
“some people don’t resemble friends, they are those friends, just born thousand of miles away.”
Yes. That makes much more sense when put this way.
Have you ever spoken to and then become friends with the people that resemble your original friends?
Have you been in situations where you are around someone who resembles someone that you were not too fond of yet is completely different in every way? IF that happened, did you become uncomfortable because of the past memory between you and the other person?
Thank you for your previous response. Good points.
Ashley
Posted by MacDara 2003.03.31, 08:49
Now that I think more about it, I have had an experience similar to what’s being discussed here, but it wasn’t of seeing a friend in a foreign place per se… I used to work in a music store that has its fair share of celebrity customers - I missed out on meeting Jackie Chan and James Earl Jones, but I did meet Michael Wincott, and he is a very nice man.
One Sunday morning, a secretive looking man with a tatty baseball cap and dark glasses approached my till, a man who bore more than a striking resemblence to Luis Guzman. I normally confirm my celebrities by their credit cards - they almost always pay by credit card - but he payed in cash, which intrigued me even more. But I wasn’t about to say, ‘hey, are you Luis Guzman?’ because that’s just not my style. Also I was really starstruk.
To this day I still wonder, was it really Luis?
Posted by Jeff 2003.03.31, 22:43
Jeremy, this is a great topic. Before coming to Japan, the first non-western country I ever visited, I thought about the cultural biases from childhood (such as “all Japanese look alike”).
I was amazed (but not surprised) when I saw the reality: despite the homogenous qualities of the culture, the diversity of facial and body features seemed as diverse as I saw at home in America.
After spending some weeks there I, too, began to see features in people that reminded me of my friends back home.
Posted by Ben 2003.04.01, 14:09
I’ve had similar experiences but not internationally (since the farthest out of the US I’ve been is Toronto). Instead, interstate and between cities. I’ve seen many people who look like the famous and even more who look nearly identical to my best friends.
It’s very very interesting.
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