Self-Portraits series
June 11th, 2006
J is my middle initial. What about it?
*
In other news, I am haunted by the story of a woman who married a cobra.
A woman who fell in love with a snake has married the reptile at a traditional Hindu wedding celebrated by 2,000 guests in India’s Orissa state, reports said.
Bimbala Das wore a silk saree for the ceremony Wednesday at Atala village near the Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar. [...]
Villagers welcomed the wedding in the belief it would bring good fortune and laid on a feast for the big day.
Snakes and particularly the King Cobra are venerated in India as religious symbols worn by Lord Shiva, the god of destruction.
Das, from a lower caste, converted to the animal-loving vegetarian Vaishnav sect whose local elders gave her permission to marry the cobra, the world’s largest venomous snake that can grow up to five metres.
“I am happy,” said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.
“Bimbala was ill,” Bhoi told local OTV channel. “We had no money to treat her. Then she started offering milk to the snake … she was cured. That made her fall in love.”
Das has moved into a hut built close to the ant hill since the wedding.
Earlier this year, a tribal girl was married off to a dog on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar.
*
I’m not very competitive, but I couldn’t resist joining Crack Skull Bob’s Self-Portrait Marathon (found via Blaugustine). Check out the marathon portrait gallery, complete with thumbnails. Sparky Donatello himself is a terrific sketch artist, and I’ve become an instant fan of his blog.
June 13th, 2006
My second entry in the self-portrait marathon
“Microsoft: Zombies most prevalent Windows threat,” says the headline. Zombies? O.K., I’ll bite.
Many Windows PCs have been turned into zombies, but rootkits are not yet widespread, according to a Microsoft security report slated for release Monday.
More than 60 percent of compromised Windows PCs scanned by Microsoft’s Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool between January 2005 and March 2006 were found to be running malicious bot software, the company said. The tool removed at least one version of the remote-control software from about 3.5 million PCs, it added. That’s compared with an overall 5.7 million machines with infections overall.
“Backdoor Trojans”are a significant and tangible threat to Windows users,” Microsoft said in the report.
Let me be your backdoor Trojan, baby.
June 14th, 2006
My third entry in the self-portrait marathon
How public. Like a frog.
June 15th, 2006
My fourth entry in the self-portrait marathon
I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets — but it’s what the people want.
–Turkmenbashi
Never read about the Turkmenbashi right before going to bed. While I slept, a bland, doughy face came looking in the window.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Water dripping on a steel roof in the prison yard.
The golden statue revolves on top of its pedestal not in order to follow the sun, as malicious outsiders claim, but in order to keep from falling into shadow. A positive attitude is a powerful potion, chant the people’s deputies.
Tink, tink, tink: spoons on glasses in the golden-domed palace. The blandest of smiles, announcing the abolition of the death penalty. Across the boulevard at the U.S. embassy, it’s like a group orgasm as cellphones in pants pockets all begin to vibrate at once.
I am a bystander in my own dream. Who are all these blue horsemen flourishing their sabers so cinematically? They gallop into the forest in a large, public park just as some demonstrators — Young Turkmens, I guess — lead a mob of military police into the same forest from the other side.
Is it that I have no stomach for gore, or that, fed on a diet of bloodless history, I lack the mental imagery? The trees hide everything. I hear shots and screams, and the winnying of horses.
Half of the horsemen come out, but none of the police. The voice of the omniscient narrator hesitates, then tells the truth. The horsemen were patriotic defenders of Turkmenistan; the police were vile enemies of the people. There will be democratic elections. Tink, tink, tink.
Now I am there in person, and so are you. We bloggers have chosen Ashgabat as our next gathering spot — it’s centrally located, we say. The elections were a smashing success; they have democracy now. The Turkmenbashi’s head smiles blandly from the top of a revolving stake.
The former secret police have new jobs as pimps and pickpockets, thugs and drug runners. They follow us everywhere. Four of them rob us at knifepoint in a crowded restaurant.
Our shouts for help arouse nothing but studied disinterest from the other diners. Then I get an idea. Tap your spoons against your wineglasses, I urge my companions.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
June 16th, 2006
My fifth entry in the self-portrait marathon
But really, is this the face of an artist? Who am I kidding? Not my wise friends the flies, who rub their forefeet together in a travesty of devotion. En boca cerrada no entran moscas — flies don’t enter a closed mouth, says the Mexican proverb. But when is my mouth ever really closed, except for the fraction of a second that the camera shutter is open? Let the saints train their tongues to lie still as stones & their eyes to gaze modestly at their navels. It’s sheer hypocrisy to praise the open tomb while preparing oneself for the sealed reliquary. And in any case, the crawling faithful prefer the glistening surfaces of breasts or buttocks, with those dark & inviting hollows in between.
“First of all as to the patient’s face,” says Hippocrates: “does it resemble or not the face of persons in good health, and especially does it resemble itself?” This is what I’m wondering, my faithful physicians, health care in this country being as moribund as it is. You can rub your hands together all you want — you won’t get a dime of insurance out of me! Do I look like a rich man to you? Does my face have the unnatural glow of those who frequent health clubs with mirrored walls or fly airplanes into skyscrapers?
What you call dyslexia, I call poetry: an affliction in which nothing resembles itself, ever. A great poet like Eugénio de Andrade exceeds himself at every turn. Esta noite preciso de outro verí£o sobre a boca crescendo nem que seja de rastros, he wrote — “This night I need another summer on my mouth, gathering, even at a crawl.”
Would you recognize your own face if you saw it coming toward you down the street, without the usual soundtrack running through your head? Would you welcome it as an end to exile, or would you get out the flyswatter & the can of Raid? “Mama get your hatchet,” begged the bluesman Furry Lewis, “kill the fly on your baby’s head.” Buddhahood, they say, can be hazardous to your health. Best to go meditate on a corpse.
June 19th, 2006
My sixth entry in the self-portrait marathon
I got an email from Lorianne this morning:
Do you realize your two most recent posts are “Flag Flies”????
Oops.
June 22nd, 2006
My seventh entry in the self-portrait marathon
My mother’s people gaze across at my father’s people in the narrow upstairs hallway of my parents’ house. It all seems amicable enough. Some were rich, some were poor, but most were somewhere in the middle. Both sides are dominated by people of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, with a little French Canadian and Irish thrown in. A discouragingly large number on both sides were teetotaling Methodists, but for all that, they don’t look any more sober than decorum required.
Aside from genealogists, most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about their ancestors. After all, we are descended from the disinherited and the violently dispossessed — or at the least, from people who believed in leaving the past behind. And we’re still that way, aren’t we? We think of our ancestors as forebears only, and believe them quite irretrievably dead and gone — perhaps to a better place from which they might occasionally cast a fond glance in our direction, but that’s all. They’re not expected to take an active interest in the affairs of their descendents, much less transmigrate back into the clan. Sometimes one of them might come back as a ghost, but that’s about it.
I think it’s important to remember how odd this belief about our ancestors makes us, how much of an exception to the general run of societies around the world. Combine that with our astonishing ignorance of history — even quite recent history — and I think it’s safe to say that we Americans are almost uniquely alienated from our roots. It goes along with our alienation from nature, I believe, and in some respects probably helps license the on-going commodification of what used to be thought of as Creation. In pre-modern Europe, the dead were buried in the churchyard at the center of the village, and had their day on the calendar (All Souls Day). Ancestor reverence formed a minor part of a complex system of traditional observances — including local saints’ days, rogations, feasts and fasts — which all together told people who they were and where they came from. Carnival rites linked bodily symbolism, both sacred and profane, with the cosmic drama of changing seasons and renewed fertility.
The Protestant Reformation did away with most of that, and the Industrial Revolution finished it off. The 19th-century bourgeois novel and 20th-century psychology invented the isolated, narrowly sexual and generally neurotic individual, and the Great Awakening and subsequent religious movements stressed a personal relationship with God or Jesus above all else. My Methodist ancestors seem, on the whole, content with this arrangement. They knew how to compose themselves for a photograph, wearing their Sunday best and meditating on eternity, or something else completely apart from daily life, for as long as it took the man with the box and the flash to capture their likenesses. They rest easy in their frames, smiling sardonically — if at all — at the thought that some lonely fool might someday long to re-enter those frozen moments.
June 29th, 2006
My eighth entry in the self-portrait marathon
Meanwhile, there are entire towns where nothing terrible is happening for an hour or two, where parents are caring for children with remarkable tenderness, where nurses are tending patients, mail carriers are delivering packages, and at least one man who owns a small business is taking off work early to coach a girl’s soccer team. Terrible things will continue to happen in those places, which the best efforts of such people will not be sufficient to prevent, but their bursts of gratuitous kindness are the mustard seeds from which healing bushes sometimes grow. They constitute the alternate reality that I want to live in, even if it means limiting my exposure to other kinds of news.
–Barbara Brown Taylor, “What’s new?” The Christian Century, May 30, 2006
As I sat on my porch this morning drinking my coffee around 6:30, I watched a lightning bug fly past with its lamp extinguished and decided it was time to do another self-portrait.
I don’t know what kind of play the self-portrait marathon is getting in the larger blogosphere, but I doubt it’s attracting the kind of breathless attention devoted to the latest Supreme Court decision, or whatever fresh horror is emerging from Iraq or the Occupied Territories. And perhaps that’s as it should be. But if you haven’t stopped by lately to check out the gallery, you should. You can view it as a Flickr slideshow, too.
While it’s easy to be cynical and dismiss the self-portrait marathon as nothing more than an outlet for bloggers’ unflagging tendency toward self-absorption, I think that misses the real story. Over 75 bloggers, from amateur shutterbugs like me to professional portrait painters, have committed to taking a prolonged, in-depth look at one subject — a subject that Agatha Christie once described as “perhaps the greatest mystery of all: ourselves.” And as the galleries attest, many of the results have been quite striking.
The blogosphere has been billed as an alternative to the mainstream media, but in many ways, it’s just as superficial. The emphasis remains on speed rather than accuracy, sensationalism rather than nuance, and two-sided conflicts rather than the full complexity of life as most of us experience it in our daily lives. Even for us non-political bloggers, there’s a great temptation to simply post our latest snapshots, with a few accompanying sentences of breathless prose, and move on to something else. To try to see anything more fully, to observe it attentively and then take the time to describe or depict it with as much care and effort as we can muster seems almost counter-cultural. But if the bloggers I tend to read have anything in common, it might be precisely this, that they are dedicated to documenting what Barbara Brown Taylor refers to as “alternate reality.”
Twenty-eight great-
spangled fritillaries
on one small clump
of butterfly weed
lifting & settling
to pivot on the un-
steady dust-devils
of their tongues,
their wings rocking
halfway open for
balance, orange
against orange.
Ezra Pound famously described literature as “news that stays news.” Fine. But what do we mean by news? Isn’t there something inescapably sensationalistic about the practice of selecting and highlighting certain phenomena, pushing the rest into the background? Well, perhaps so. But barring enlightenment, how else are we to see?
It occurs to me that this definition, “news that stays news,” captures pre-modern and non-Western attitudes toward elevated language, as well. Consider, for example, the song cycles that once accompanied all-night circle dances of the O’odham, or the spontaneously generated, loosely linked verses of one of the old-time blues poets like Son House or Bukka White. From one perspective, such lyrics employ traditional folk material, and therefore must be the opposite of news. But if words are treated as living, ephemeral beings rather than marks on the page, and therefore must be re-created for every performance, how can their inspired production not constitute news?
So in that sense, I think the ephemeral and fairly spontaneous nature of the blog medium should help nudge us away from our usual Western attitude toward art as something static and eternal, the realization of some bullshit Platonic Ideal. I think the non-Western view is closer to reality. All art is inherently messy and imperfect, a moment temporarily rescued from the ceaseless flux. Whether its subject is the world without or the world within, a good work of art is nothing more or less than inspired journalism.
When I wrote an email to some family members yesterday, I mentioned two things I thought were newsworthy: the twenty-eight fritillaries, and the discovery of a nesting solitary vireo (A.K.A. blue-headed vireo) less than a hundred feet away from the nest I found last year. I can’t claim credit for this discovery, though. Two biology students from Penn State Altoona, who are working on a research project up in our woods, told me about it when they stopped to admire the fritillary-covered butterfly weed on their way back down the mountain. They were abashed they’d never noticed the nest before, and so was I when I went to look. It’s about eight feet off the ground above one of our most frequently traveled trails, right in front of one of the gates to our three-acre deer exclosure. How in the world could we all have missed it?
The vireo let me walk right under the nest and snap pictures from two feet away, her head swiveling to follow my movements. Since the nest is wedged into a small fork on a witch hazel branch — the favorite tool of water dowsers here in the Appalachians — I wonder whether the eventual fledglings will be gifted with the ability to locate hidden springs? Will the healing properties of witch hazel make the nest’s occupants somehow less vulnerable?
At the beginning of this post, I quoted Barbara Brown Taylor on “healing bushes” (a phrase which, taken out of context, might seem to have a certain political resonance!). Her focus was on the Bible’s Good News, but this quite literal healing tree with its avian occupants — not an “alternate reality,” but the real world as we all too seldom remember to see it — is gospel enough for me.
July 5th, 2006
This is my final entry in the self-portrait marathon, which ends this week. I snapped it on Saturday, from almost the exact same position where the photo I have been using in each of the other portraits in this series was snapped. In this one, of course, the angle is different, though I expect you’ll recognize the yellow wall. You can also see the legs of the tripod I used for the original shot poking out from behind the coat on my coat rack. I had been drinking mugwort ale and was, shall we say, in a rather elevated mood when, on my way toward the kitchen, I noticed these shadows cast by the setting sun, sat down in my swivel chair, and took four pictures. This was the fourth. I was dimly aware that it might be an important shot, but did not realize that it contained my own likeness until days later, when I uploaded the pictures to my computer.
Here’s a close-up with the contrast increased, in case you’re having trouble seeing the portrait. It’s a pretty good likeness, I think, though the mouth is canted a little strangely, as if I were laughing at some private joke. One thing you’ll notice about self-portraits is that the subjects are almost never smiling. If they were, I suppose we might worry a bit about the author’s mental health.
This morning I was re-reading a not terribly good translation of the tenth-century Japanese fictional diary Tosa nikki, by Ki no Tsurayuki. Since I had alluded to it in yesterday’s poem, I thought it might be interesting to see if I still liked it, two decades after my first encounter with it. I was blown away.
It occurred to me as I read it that it functions on one level as a kind of ironic self-portrait. And since women were considered more vulnerable than men, by inventing a female protagonist to narrate in his stead, its author, the reigning poet and literary critic of his day, could explore in depth what it meant to be an artist or poet, with one’s heart-mind (kokoro) continually open to everything around it.
In the diary, amid all the high drama and low comedy of the ex-governor’s (i.e., Tsurayuki’s) slow progress by boat along the coast of Shikoku and Honshu en route to Kyoto, the narrator keeps returning to her deep sorrow for a young son who died a short time before. Her precise relationship to the ex-governor is never spelled out — one of several omissions designed to pique the reader’s interest. In line with Tsurayuki’s theory — articulated in his preface to the great imperial anthology of poetry, the Kokinshu, which he helped edit — poems arise spontaneously from the narrator’s heart in response to her strong emotions on seeing various things deemed poetic, usually natural phenomena.* But of course in reality Tsurayuki must have composed them himself, seemingly undercutting his own theory. Her poems are much the best of those included in the diary, but she chooses not to share them with anyone, whispering them to herself and consigning them to a diary which, she says at the end, “I really ought to tear up and be done with.”
As was normal in the aristocratic culture of the time, the people in the diary are constantly composing and exchanging poems. Despite our narrator’s superficial resemblance to Emily Dickinson, poems in her age were generally not the products of a unique and private vision, but a kind of social currency used to establish and maintain relationships of all kinds.
With one exception, the worst poems recorded in the Tosa Diary are all by the ex-governor. But because of his high position, no one has the courage to tell him how bad they are. That’s partly why this work strikes me as an ironic self-portrait by a poet in the twilight of his career. By contrast, several precocious children manage to come up with poems that are deemed very good, and even the illiterate captain, quite by accident, at one point shouts commands to his crew in what the astonished narrator declares is a perfect tanka!
The captain is also at the center of the most dramatic and possibly the most telling incident in the diary. Throughout the voyage, they are plagued by high seas, adverse winds and the threat of attack by pirates. Near the end, a gale blows up while they’re offshore at a place called Sumiyoshi, which is celebrated in Japanese verse for the abundance of a grass called wasuregusa — “grass of forgetfulness,” or maybe “oblivion grass.” The narrator has just composed a sad poem about her desire to forget, if only for a moment, her sorrow at the death of her child. The sudden high seas threaten to capsize the boat, and the captain tries the standard offering of sacred shredded cloth to try and pacify the local spirit of the place, without effect. At last he hauls out a mirror — at the time, a rare and valuable object — and quotes a proverb: “We have two good eyes, but one thing more precious.” A footnote in my edition explains that this is usually a reference to one’s children, not to a mirror. The captain casts the mirror into the sea, and almost immediately the storm begins to ebb. The narrator concludes,
The [poetic] things associated with this place — the calm sea of Sumiyoshi, the grasses of forgetfulness of care, and the elephant princess-pines of the shore — the god resembles none of them. It was plain to see that the god’s desire was reflected in that mirror and that the mind of the captain understood that of the god. (Earl Miner, tr., in Japanese Poetic Diaries, University of California Press, 1969)
In his poetic manifesto, written years earlier, Tsurayuki had maintained that poetry possesses the non-coercive power to “move heaven and earth” and “wake the feelings of the unseen gods and spirits” (see footnote). Now, in the Tosa nikki, he seems less certain of this. Perhaps, like many aging aristocrats in 10th-century Japan, he was coming increasingly under the influence of Buddhist notions of no-self and emptiness. If the heart or mind of the artist is, as the ancient Japanese thought, a mirror held up to nature, what do we do about this foolish being, this creature of inexplicable emotions, who keeps appearing in it every time we try to see what it really holds?
__________
* Here’s the first paragraph of the preface, as translated by Burton Watson in From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, Anchor/Doubleday, 1981.
Japanese poetry has its seeds in the human heart, and takes form in the countless leaves that are words. So much happens to us while we live in this world that we must voice the thoughts that are in our hearts, conveying them through the things we see and the things we hear. We hear the bush warbler singing in the flowers or the voice of the frogs that live in the water and know that among all living creatures there is not one that does not have its song. It is poetry that, without exerting force, can move heaven and earth, wake the feelings of the unseen gods and spirits, soften the relations between man and woman, and soothe the heart of the fierce warrior.
February 2nd, 2007
Seated between the quietly humming computer and the cold-air return vent for the furnace, I begin to hear voices. It’s not the stirring of a crowd united in passion for some cause or spectacle, nor the whispers of a moss colony buried by snow, but a simple and pleasing cacophony — the kind that grows from any gathering in which many conversations blend and merge. Picture yourself in some cave-like station or terminal where every other person is speaking animatedly into a cell phone. They might as well each be talking to God, except that, from time to time, they pause to listen. That’s what this pause is like. I’m tired and I’ve run out of things to say, so I give listening a try. The furnace stops, and a moment later the refrigerator shudders into silence. I power down the computer; the voices merely rise in pitch, till they are thin as the hairs on a fly. Call it sensory deprivation if you want. It’s past midnight, the full moon is hidden by clouds and I’m sitting in the dark, accompanied by the white noise of angels in which I do not believe.
February 4th, 2008
Click on image to view the full-size version
A footprint is a sign; a handprint is a message.
This one says: I choose transparency because that’s the best way to hide.
Solitude is a salt lake with five inlets.
Sand can return to stone, but can glass ever return to sand?
My hand was so thick, I couldn’t see the fog in front of me.
Ice is a form of immobility that doesn’t keep. By the time I got my photos of the ice storm home & took them out of my camera, they had already lost almost all their glitter.
When the sky falls, it clings to everything. Trees snap with the weight of it. Beauty is best kept at arm’s length.
If it weren’t for wonder, I might have to go make something of myself.
Trees in the winter aren’t sleeping; they’re procrastinating.
Always remember that nature is out to kill you.
__________
Inspired by the posts at the communal self-portrait site Autography (tagline: “Self-Portrait as Story”).
November 2nd, 2008
Skullfinger ribrattles banjo my nightjar lids,
those fictions, those nictitating membranes
stretched between the Pleiades. (Say what?)
I will make of my Adamic rib an ivory toothpick.
Look, there’s little else you can do with such
bonewhite lies as I am heir to. (Soup?
Scrimshaw?) I mean, sure, a skeleton’s O.K.
for morality plays. But the inescable
optimism implicit in my barebones grin?
That’s not me. I am what I ham what I eat.
*
I go slow because I can,
practicing non-attachment:
pieces of me break off & stick
to anyone who gets too close,
& I’m not responsible for
whatever happens to your wet
nose next. Let me be.
Trees are my only love.
You may have seen me high in an elm,
sihouetted against the night sky
like the moon’s bucktoothed uncle.
I find a mate once a year
on the coldest night in January,
& our fierce cries make even the bears
roll in the graves of their sleep.
*
House, my ass!
It’s a carapace
to which
I’m stitched
& welded
& I can no more
leave than you
can enter
these six doors
with no locks—
which are all
one to me,
headless legless
round box
turtle.
*
One Sunday morning
kids sneak onto the construction site
nothing but a cage of studs & trusses
with a floor they play upon for hours
running from room to imaginary room
the whole world close enough to touch
__________
In partial response to a ReadWritePoem prompt, “peel the onion.” It’s another experiment in open-content collaboration, which I applaud despite being too much of a loner (see above) to engage in true collaboration very often. (And I should add that all my poetry is always available for creative remixing, as the CC license on this site makes clear.)
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