Friend: Matt, you are absolutely the master of the selfie!
Self: Well, that's not a thing to be proud of, entirely, but --hey-- Rembrandt created almost a hundred selfies, and he had to paint each one. My point is not that I'm a Rembrandt, but if such were good enough for him, it's golden for me. I'm the easiest model I have to work with, and I have fun with the lines, the shadows, and the (oft silly) scenes. Tomorrow, there'll probably be one with me in my new leather medieval English helmet. How can I resist?
Friend: If I posted the ones I've tried taking, you'd see why yours are so good. Looking forward to the helmet.
Self: Oh, I delete so many. Oddly enough, the first few tend to be the best ones.
I mean what I said above about lines and shadows and silliness and the easiest model to work with.
Also, if you look back upward at the first self-portrait I've provided by Rembrandt, will you not admire the work with lines and shadows and maybe a bit of silliness there too? I admire so much of Rembrandt's work, and I hadn't appreciated that drawing until I posted it for this entry. Witnessing comes in various forms, not all of them self-serving.
(I'm tempted to remake that last sentence into something metaphorical with a tree of many branches, but if I do, I just may end up hanging myself in effigy there, and I don't quite want to do that.)
Most times, I don't quite even look like myself. Do you know what I mean? That self in my head, that self I'm conjuring up and projecting from the images of earlier days, childhood and youth and what-have-you. That's what I am tracking, keeping track of, witnessing. The syntax of self over time and through time. A quixotic quest, no doubt. And one worthless to all but the wandering tracker.
Previously, I've reflected and quoted Fowles on the reflex toward self-representation, even excessive self-representation, as a move from subjectivity toward objectivity, from the first (and fallible) person toward the third (outsider) person, (which you may find in a link here in "Don Quixote's Mirror").
I find the grammar of self to be almost as amusing as the syntax of identity and authenticity, but that comment belongs to a separate blog entry at another time.
*Prof. Andrew Griffin taught me of Rembrandt's many self-representations in office-hour conversations in my undergraduate days. His energy and his style have helped to shape my teaching style, among other things. I owe him a debt I haven't yet repaid, and at this late date, I am not sure how.
The images in this entry are all photos of reproductions from and of Christopher Wright's Rembrandt: Self-Portraits, The Viking Press: New York, 1982.