Reflections and Traces in Deathly Hallows

I just wrote this in an email to my mother, to whom I had given Deathly Hallows for her birthday in early August. She had written when finishing the book that she was very pleased, especially with how Dumbledore was handled and closed out. she had been beginning reading when I gave it to her on a weekend I was back in that area for a friend's wedding, and had obviously gotten to the "In Memoriam" chapter and she was asking about the blue eye in the mirror. Obviously I could not give spoiler material to her, but writing this recently actually gave me a chance to update a post I had put in draft form after about 80 pages into my first read and to get the impact the eye in the mirror had on me into a form that makes sense to me with what it wound up being in the end. (at the end there are a few extra notes of thoughts) But you see why I could not say about the blue eye in the mirror, that is was Aberforth's eye. Actually I think you were meant to wonder about that until you got the whole story, including the material in the King's Cross chapter, especially the line that "of course it is in your head, but why on earth does that mean it should not be real?" I think one is meant to think that the blue eye in the mirror could be Dumbledore's, really Dumbledore's, not just "Harry's feelings about Dumbledore" ... but a real part of Dumbledore that He left with/in Harry in the way all people leave themselves in those they love (because I think the books are meant to be about real things of real human beings ... in this instance what it is to lose somebody you love, not just somebody you have simply had "knowledge about" but real contact with their person, with what is really them, in such a way that they leave an imprint on you and you leave one on them). In the end it is Aberforth's eye, which works "better" on the mechanical level, but I think it is also still sort of Albus' in that it is sort of the part of Albus he left with Aberforth, a connection of caring about Harry and what happens to him. In the third book I remember being sort of dissatisfied with the explanation of patronuses, that Harry's being a stag simply means it is the part of his dad in him, ... it still seemed liked too much "you have everything you need right inside you already ... you don't need help from outside or above." I wanted it to be more clearly "transcendant" ... but this image of the eye in the mirror actually put a different and better light on it for me. Note 1: I was really happy when I lit on the idea of human persons leaving "traces" on each other's persons through personal contact. One of the reason's I liked it so much was that the image explains, for me, better the way it (for example the eye in the mirror being actually DD as well as Harry, or maybe can be DD himself brought out in Harry precisely by Aberforth) can be the "other" person - I mean that as the truly other person, I put it in quotes only because it is a paramount theme for postmodernism - usually called the "problem of alterity" - it drives much of Derrida's idea of differance. But the thinker for whom it plays a really large role is Levinas, who is also, coincidentally, the thinker from whom I picked up the theme of "trace" in regard to human presence/being. Note 2: This actually dovetails nicely with what I have been saying (at least it seems to me like it does, and I use the "dove" image purposefully for this thought, as the bird of peace) about "psychic invasion." Like I was saying at one point about Derrida's concept of language and presence as an invasion, and the role that can play in the interp of the AK, it is an invasion that occurs no matter what when humans have personal contact with each other, which, of course, is impossible to avoid ("no man is an island" etc) ... which way it goes it up to whether or not we choose charity towards each other (and, from a Traditional Christian perspective, there is only one thing can enable us to do that fully, which is Grace). But, for here, a concept of human beings leaving traces on each other, especially interior/psychological/spiritual traces, is (it seems to me) very consistent with the idea of a natural inter-penetration of persons occurring in all human contact. Note 3: I was talking with a guy once who I knew - I can't remember which of us said it, or if it arose piecemeal from comments by both of us, but we were talking about our relationships with our fathers, and this is what came to mind immediately when I was reading this section for the first time and had the thoughts above about the part of DD in Harry, especially having recently reread Harry's raging in the end of book 5: "you realize your connection with your father when you realize that you want to yell and scream at him but the only voice you have with which you can do it is the one you inherited from him." Note 4: This all falls under the big theme for summer of 2007 for me, at least in Harry Potter and POTC land, on the heals of having just finished a course on PoMo philosophy (and just sat in on the first class of a course in Philosophy of Literature in which the professor brought it up again prominently) - which is a concept in Heidegger called "being towards death."