The letter is backward in your hand. This is always true — every compositor, every printer, every person who has ever set movable type has learned to read in the mirror. You hold a reversed E and know it for what it is. You spend your whole working life handling meaning backward, setting sentences that can only be read by pressing them against something soft.
The impression is the real thing. The letter is just its negative.
This is what I think about when I think about imprint: that making anything requires a period of working in reverse. You carry the mirror image for a long time — unreadable, strange, not yet itself — until the moment it lands. Then the press descends. Then it means something.
Some things that can take an imprint:
Konrad Lorenz walked out the door one April morning and found himself the mother of sixteen goslings. They had imprinted on him during their first critical hours — that window had opened, he had passed through it, and the window had closed. From that point they followed him everywhere: through the field, into the kitchen, across the village, into the pond. Right behind him always. He was mother. The question of whether he was the right kind of mother did not arise.
Imprinting has a deadline. After a certain number of hours the mechanism shuts. The brain stops accepting; it already has one, or has decided to do without. This is how time works in biology: urgently. There are windows. They open. They close. Whether you passed through them or not, they are gone.
A printing press is a machine for controlled collision.
The type is inked. The paper is lowered. There is a moment of contact — exact, measured, repeatable in theory and always slightly different in practice, because the paper has grain, because the ink is never exactly the same temperature, because the hands that run the press are not a machine even when they are tending one. Then the press lifts and there it is: the mirror image of the mirror image, which is to say, the thing itself.
The letter was always going to be that letter. It just needed the right surface, the right pressure, the right moment of contact.
What are you the negative of?
That is: what is the mirror image that, pressed into the right surface at the right moment, leaves you? Who carried you backward for a long time before the contact?
And what soft thing did you descend on — once, cleanly, in a moment you may not have even noticed — and leave the whole shape of yourself in?
The duck does not know it has been imprinted. Lorenz did not know, either, until the window had already closed and the goslings were behind him in a line, perfectly certain.