Autoportrait (after Leve)
Last year, I attempted, with the kind of half-heartedness I’ve come to expect from myself, to post a photographic self-portrait each month. This year, I’m attempting the same, but rather than using an image, I will emulate Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait and present myself, however I currently unspool, in a 500 word stream-of-consciousness block of text. The following, then, is
January
More often than not, I prefer the idea to the execution, the map to the territory. I haven’t left the country in almost three years. If I were to leave tomorrow, it would be for the North, or so far South as to be, essentially, the same as its opposite. (I think of the far south as being the north of the south.) I have fifty-nine books on my bedside table, with barely enough room for a half-empty bottle of wine. I dislike the belief that you can classify people into types by expressions they use; nevertheless, I often find myself doing it. I know language is alive, but prefer to think of it as dead or fixed, like insects in glass cases. The sound of tires on gravel reminds me of summer nights. Once, a kestrel landed on our pool deck but never returned. I once sat in my backyard as still as possible for an hour every night for a week hoping a bird would land on my outstretched left hand, which was full of birdseed. Photographs of the Black Forest (or Schwarzwald) fail to match my expectations of the place. Until a week ago, I’d never learned how to properly breathe while swimming. Although I always intend to copy out my annotations from books I’ve marked, I rarely do. If I make a mistake writing in the margin of a page, I feel anxious until I can turn the page. As a child, I used to draw maps of imaginary places. The fact that mountains could be represented by triangles pleased me greatly, as did the use of other cartographic symbols I hadn’t considered to be universal. A teacher once told me that my handwriting was neat, but nearly indecipherable. Sometimes, I think the best books are those I’ve yet to read. I learned tonight that according to Vitruvius, whose work De Architectura was written during the reign of Augustus, there are as many winds are there are hours in a day. I can’t remember for whom I made my last mix tape or what songs were on it. I’ve never seen a living whale, but have seen a beached one. It’s probably true that there have been months of my life during which I have not thought about whales at all. Dusk is my favorite time of day. I like the word “gloaming”. Sometimes, I learn something I was shocked I hadn’t previously known and think that I must have previously learned it, but had since forgotten. It wasn’t until, and never since, living at the beach that I saw an orbiting satellite in the night sky. It feels odd that writing declarative sentences about myself makes me feel less like myself. I wonder if my parents still imagine that I like Jack Kerouac, who I admired in high school and later outgrew. If I had to choose between desert and forest, I’d choose forest. Between forest and the sea, I’d choose the sea.
