A Reflection on Shopping

Traveling changes seeing . . .


Here in Berlin, I often feel as if I’m looking through three eyes -- the pair that Berlin squeegees clean on a daily basis, and my camera’s third eye, blinking away the rest of the dust.



I’ve been thinking lately about storefronts, about how you can see what’s inside their windows while simultaneously seeing your own face reflected on the surface. A shop window bounces back a more complex reflection than a mirror. While a mirror’s purpose is to show us how we look, as in what we look like, a shop window shows us how we look, as in how we see – i.e. with greed, with longing, with the despair of knowing we will never own that beautiful object, etc. But with a shop window, we only see our reflection if we choose to look at the window’s surface rather than through its transparent skin.


The other day, I was discussing one mutual friend with another mutual friend and we agreed that our mutual friend had perhaps stopped actively shopping for a relationship because this friend was looking for perfection. With that goal in mind, we mutually agreed (reflecting each other’s good sense), a perfect partner would never be available because perfection does not exist. And perhaps that’s the goal of our mutual friend: to live in a world of endless potential rather than risk what might appear to be settling for less. I realized during the conversation that I was critical of the mutual friend’s quest for perfection both because I felt victimized by it – I am not perfect, therefore, I will never be the chosen one – and because I am the same – always wondering if there will be something better around the corner. I have already sustained tremendous losses with this thinking. But it seems my head needs more glass banging before I see what’s in front of my eyes.



Window shopping: it’s what I do to satisfy my cravings without taking a risk; it’s how I trick myself into believing the next window will have what I want at not too high a cost. It’s an impoverished way to shop, never mind live. Sometimes, however, I can’t decide if shopping per se is the problem, or just the way I go about it. Because part of me also thinks that shopping is too complex to slip so easily into my “bad thing” category; shopping can also be an act of tremendous generosity towards others, as well as a gesture of love towards one’s self.



And that’s the essence of shopping, isn’t it – not the buying, but the act of being in the act: of looking, assessing, weighing, wondering if you’re getting a deal or being ripped off, imagining the object adorning your home or your person: what joys will it bring? Will I tire of it too soon to make the cost worthwhile? Will it fall out of fashion? Will it need an upgrade? Will I stop loving it and want something better? But also, would that thing in the window make this or that person happy? Is it the perfect gift? Is it about putting a smile on your beloved’s face that makes it so worthwhile, or is it about seeing yourself reflected as the smile giver?




None of this thinking is new, of course, but it does seem to come into sharper focus every time some poignant piece of adversity makes its way into my filed of vision.


Take the US bank failures, for instance: the reasons for the failures are complex, and I don’t pretend to understand most of them, but I have been told that senior bankers saw short-term gain in offering sub-prime loans to people who would not likely be able to pay them back, thus enabling those without to have, even if only for a moment. But this was not a gift giving. The bankers were shopping for themselves, looking for customers for their product, motivated by greed, while playing on the buy-now-pay-later addiction/ethos. They blithely ignored the inevitable consequences for the receiver, which they knew about but relegated to a problem for “down the road”, and, more selfishly, for “others”. Shopping on credit is like watching a horror film through your fingers. The only way to really stop the gore is to leave the theatre, but we can’t. We’re riveted. Is it because we are hoping against hope for a different ending?



One Christmas (though it could have been any Christmas), I went shopping with a friend, and had one of those CGI special-effects moments as we entered the cosmetic area of the department store – the tinsel strewn, floodlit room that offered row upon row of seductively-packaged cosmetics artfully displayed on glass shelves or in glass display cases suddenly dissolved into a dark ware-house-sized space filled to the rafters with sickening amounts of landfill. And this was just one department store among thousands in the city, never mind the thousands of department stores across the country and around the world. It was so clear to me at the time: shopping is garbage.




When I moved to Montreal, I shopped for men. I don’t mean I bought men clothes, I mean I trolled online dating sites to see who I could pick up.


What I noticed in myself was not an over consumption of product, but rather a summary dismissal of the pickings that appeared slim to me. I eventually became so disgusted with my superficial response that I forced myself to paint portraits of the men I did not find attractive based solely on their low-res digi pics (I hadn’t bothered to read their profiles).



When I had amassed about twenty of them, I mounted an exhibition, displaying what I came to think of as “my boys” – a single row of hopeful heads, expressive faces, risk takers (I tried not to think of deer heads or trophy kill).



While painting the boys, I had added pink to wan skin, and a few pounds to gaunt cheeks, thus modeling them into something I might want. When I exhibited them, I understood I had not so much painted portraits as I had created a series of mirrors.



Now I think what I created was a storefront window. But a store more like Monty Python’s cheese shop in which the owner claims to have an array of cheeses for sale . . .

but the cheese shopper is told that each cheese requested is not available for a variety of eccentric reasons.

In the end, my boys, like the cheeses, were not actually available, except as an ideal.



As expressions of my own longings, of my own prayer to the universe for someone to love me and someone to love, the boys’ value was incalculable. My desire to trade them for money, thus enabling me to purchase some bauble that might bring me momentary joy, was supplanted by a stronger and inexplicable desire to keep them close. No, I could not part with a single one of them. Simply put: they were not for sale.