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.
Aside: Watching myself age seems hardly the epitome of vanity. The posting is a measure, a formality, a witnessing more than any sort of declaration. Besides, who is watching? This blog doesn't get that much traffic, frankly, and if my self-portraits bother anyone, well, they don't have to look, right? In part, my natural diffidence has been encouraged to the point of stultification, or so it has seemed in the past, and here I'm countering that; in part, self-portraiture seems honest, an honest art, and this blog is my canvas, after all. (Should I create a spectrum to chart Vanity/Hubris, Art/Artifice, Foolery/Foolishness?) Finally, I also use this blog as a way of auditioning for further pursuits, attempting to woo the muses to help me with that novel, those short stories, or that documentary non-fiction; practice-sessions. Clay feels freer than words do, and yet that doesn't feel quite right. Posting images, self and non-self, is a way of seeing my way towards the words that matter, I am hoping.
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.
