The Mirror Test

Fragment #16

"Believe me, your words will be more imposing if you sleep on a cot and wear rags. For in that case you will not be merely saying them; you will be demonstrating their truth." - Seneca quoting Epicurus to Lucilius

I noticed an essay recently. It was an outrage essay about outrage essays using 2500+ words to become the very problem it was describing. It cited Seneca and Byung-Chul Han, possibly in attempt to prove a level of sophistication above the writers being dismissed.

Against better judgment (alas I love a challenge), I decided to play. Here is what unfolded:

Mai Comment: Rage fatigue? I'd say verbosity exhaustion. I will argue that every public piece is performance. Those that truthfully write into the gap have no need to publish it, and the cost of admission is allowing our inherent meaninglessness to be sufficient. Even this comment is a performance and attempt to pervert the inevitable. C'est la vie!

Author’s Response: The self-consuming logic here is airtight and I respect it, and it does what the best philosophical provocations do, which is implicate itself in the same breath it implicates everything else. Even this comment is a performance. Yes! And you knew that when you wrote it, which makes it either the most honest thing in this thread or a very elegant trap.

Where I’d push… the gap between performance and authenticity may be less a binary than a spectrum of self-awareness. All writing is performance in the sense that it selects, shapes, and presents. The question isn’t whether the mask exists but whether the writer knows they’re wearing it and what they do with that knowledge. Montaigne performed himself for decades and produced something that still reads as truer than most confessions after 450 years. The performance was the vehicle, not the obstacle.

The meaninglessness-as-sufficient point is the one I find the most difficult. Not wrong… but difficult. Because sitting inside inherent meaninglessness without the urge to publish it, share it, convert it into something legible and transmissible, requires a discipline that is, frankly, almost inhuman. We are meaning-making creatures publishing into a meaning-hungry void and pretending the hunger is the problem rather than the engine.

C’est la vie indeed! And yet here we both are.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Mai Comment: Valid response although Montaigne’s essay were published after his death. Inhuman according to whom? Most of the renowned essayists had their works made known posthumously. They worked in isolation, because the performance was the work. Not the visibility of sharing. While I cannot prove it as fact, your response also reads heavily AI influenced. I would have loved to read what Tamara thinks.

Author’s Response: Single link to a previously co-authored essay from 2025 titled ‘The AI Witch Hunt.’ I’d posit it was a pre-emptive defence and I’m happy to be proven wrong. The closing quote in this essay is from the co-author. It was a 4000+ word dissection of the use of AI. Both writers claim they categorically abhor the use of ANY AI in their writing.

Mai Comment: Nothing wrong with AI. I just love to also know what a writer thinks without its veneer. You can argue all day long that it requires a human to instigate the prompt, and writing an essay about a ‘witchhunt’ against those who use it, well, a skeptic with a keen eye could say that is the age-old tactic of inserting a red herring.

The problem I see is that far too few humans can disseminate the output and fully understand what is being asked and nuanced through human cognition. There is nothing insightful about copy and paste. Perhaps that might be what people are raging against - the flaccidity and repetitiveness of AI commentary.

Author’s Response: You should probably read the essay I linked before forming an opinion. I do not use AI for anything. I am too old school for that, and too educated. I am a philologist and a linguist with several degrees in literature; I speak several languages, studied Latin, and can read and translate any text in Latin, so I think I can use human cognition and form opinions better than many. But again, read the piece I linked… some of us don’t need AI to express ideas and could write before 2022.

And by the way, everything is wrong with AI today!

Mai Comment: If you say so Tamara. There is an old saying.. 'she who doth protest too much.' I did read it some time back. I also read the comments often given by AGK on your many, many posts. That's impressive, and I wish you all the success in the world. Thank you for finally defending with your human voice.

“If someone takes personal offense to a general observation, you know you’ve hit paydirt. You’re holding up a mirror, and they don’t like what they see.” - AGK

We are all performers.

"Las Meninas" by Diego Velázquez, 1656. (Source) An outstanding visual metaphor of performative layers consuming themselves. The painting famously asks: who is the real subject? Who's performing? Who's observing? What's authentic?