Mirror on the Back

 

The world, that great unblinking eye, has a way of staring past you. Not through you, mind, but past—beyond the quivering edges of your flesh, beyond the soft, unquantifiable murmur of your thoughts, to some sterile plane where everything must kneel before the altar of measurement. It’s a world that loves a number, a graph, a clean line slicing through the mess of living. And in its love, it kills—not with malice, no, but with a kind of bored precision, a disinterested swipe of the hand that says,  "This does not compute, and so it must not be ". 

I’ve been thinking about this lately, walking through the grey drizzle of a London afternoon, the kind that clings to your coat like a needy child. The city hums with its own rhythm—bus brakes hissing, a siren wailing somewhere near Kilburn—but beneath it all, there’s this other sound, quieter, insistent: the soul muttering to itself, asking,  "Am I here? Am I real? " It’s a question the objective world—that cold, scientific overseer—doesn’t care to answer. To that world, the soul’s a ghost, a smudge on the lens, something to be wiped away with a cloth dipped in antiseptic. If it can’t be weighed, tagged, plotted on a chart, then it’s nothing. A fairy tale for the weak-minded. 

But the soul, stubborn as it is, keeps knocking. It’s there in the way my auntie Joyce used to hum hymns over the stove, her voice threading through the steam of boiling yam, a sound that couldn’t be caught in a beaker but held us all anyway. It’s there in the graffiti blooming on the estate walls—wild, jagged letters shouting  "I exist "—a defiance no equation can tame. Science says:  "Show me the data ". The soul says:  "Look at me, I’m dancing ". And yet, the world turns its back, holds up its mirror, and sees only what it’s trained to see—lines and angles, the near horizon, nothing beyond.

This is how we crumble, you see. Not in some grand explosion, but in the slow unraveling of ourselves, thread by thread, until we’re convinced the inventions are all that matter. The smartphone buzzing in my pocket, the algorithm that knows I’ll want curry tonight before I’ve even smelled it—these are the gods now, small and sleek and merciless. They don’t dream. They don’t wonder. They calculate. And we, dazzled by their certainty, start to believe that’s enough. That the measurable is the meaningful. That if science can’t see it, it’s not there.

Out in the desert—somewhere far from here, where the sand stretches like a held breath—there are voices crying otherwise. They’re hoarse, cracked, unglamorous, these souls who’ve wandered too long under a sun that doesn’t care. They shout into the wind:  "Without science, we’re dead! Without its rigid truths, the days won’t break! " And I get it, I do. Science gave us penicillin, bridges, the moon landing—proof of our clever hands and restless minds. But when they say the subjective’s an illusion, when they call the spiritual a human impossibility, I feel something tighten in my chest. Because what’s a life that can’t hold both? The weight of a microscope and the weight of a prayer? 

I think of my dad, years back, sitting in his armchair with the radio on, muttering about the old gods of Jamaica—Anansi spinning his webs, the duppy lurking in the shadows. He’d laugh, sharp and quick, and say,  "You can’t put them under a glass slide, but they’re real as this chair ". And I’d roll my eyes, sixteen and full of A-level biology, thinking him old-fashioned, soft. But now, older myself, I wonder if he wasn’t onto something. Not that the spirits were out there waiting with a cup of tea, but that the world’s bigger than what we can pin down. That maybe the soul’s disintegration—the way it frays under the glare of all this certainty—is what lets us imagine, invent, believe in something beyond the next hill.

The objective world doesn’t like that. It wants us tidy, predictable, accounted for. It hangs a mirror on our backs and tells us to look—see how small you are, how neatly you fit. But I keep turning, clumsy and hopeful, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s behind the glass. Not the reflection, but the shadow. The bit that dances when the lights go out. The bit that science can’t touch, but I know—deep, deep down—is there.