Self Portrait - From and for Avery

Dear Avery,

I assume that you and I, as artists, are essentially peers. I have been working with words quite seriously for almost four years. You work with different things. But trying to make art is our work. Ignoring the differences between us and what we actually do, our creativity, attention, time, effort, discipline and more, are elements of similar process. We hope for satisfaction in our work, at least.

I also assume that this practice of making art is also going to shape the primary tool that will be used to make more art – that tool is my mind and my body. My work shapes me. See Escher’s hand, drawing a hand. Although, writing is mostly mental, the physical parts are also essential. I must learn to use my senses to experience and perceive a material and social world – my subjects. And I am material. With particular variations, of course, this basic framework I am describing could be used to think about making wooden step stools or writing songs. The good work I will do tomorrow builds on the good work I try to do today. And I try to look carefully at what I have done in the past.

Ira Glass, in a useful video, talks about the time and effort needed for artists to get to where they want to be. His essential point is that the sense that each artist has for what is ‘good’ is the key to their work. And to keep working. I mean to add to that thought the idea that my work over time is also how I will sharpen that creative sense and desire. And as the Zen masters insist, ongoing change is our fundamental constant.

But I do like the place that I find that have gotten to. I’ve done some good work. I think I understand more about what I am trying to do. And I have some time.

And here you also come to the paradox of the writer saying that writing is about so much more than words. This brief description of my processes, too, doesn’t capture everything. So very much cannot be put into words, at least, not by me.  And if you look back in time, you can see clearly how long writers have been writing and writing more words – with some exquisite success - and still not saying everything.

Have you seen the Universe lately, Avery? You haven’t seen the half of it.  This last week I saw a flower I hadn’t seen before, growing high in the Colorado Rockies. I figured out that it is called Sulfur Flower. I took pictures and I could write words, but forget about that. You should see it for yourself. As I kept on seeing Sulfur Flower everywhere, its appearance was not even the same from place to place. And concepts of time blow me away. Anyone who tries to perceive Beauty will discover bafflement. Vastness. intricacy. Randomness and personality. You and I are part of all that.

I cannot completely show you anything with my words. For example, take this fragment of a sketch – based on the wind whispering through the aspen leaves outside the window where I started writing this. Could I say that those leaves are like some dangling threadstrung silver Mylar disks hanging like a curtain across a hallway door? And then the back door opens, and then someone you love comes through that veil of shimmery disks, first their hands and arms, and then all of them. The fluttering of the aspen leaves is kind of like that.

Let me use some of the words you used in your note, I think that those sentences I just wrote don’t feel quite right. But they don’t feel all wrong, either. So I have work to do. And I will often have to be satisfied with what I could manage to say and move on.

And I have written all of this preamble to get finally get to this exercise. My subject, for today’s work, is self-portraiture. You have given me an example that opened a space in my own imagination: your small drawing of a young woman I barely know.

Now it’s my turn.

I made a small bit of video for my wife, Dawn, while I was away, hiking with a couple of friends near Eldora, Colorado. She and I have been married for almost thirty years. Now, I love bran flakes and cold milk. Usually I eat two bowls every day. Dawn has told me - every way there is to tell a man - how much the sound of me chewing and slurping my bran flakes drives her up a wall. You could ask her, if you had the time.

I set the small digital camera up on the wide railing along the walkway, part way up on the side of the cabin – it was a house, really – where my friends and I were staying. The shot would be framed by the dark brown siding behind me and a grove of light green aspen back behind, near the deck.

I pressed record. I had made a brief test to ensure that I would be just far enough from the camera so that Dawn would mostly see my head and shoulders. I was wearing a soft, dark green, long-sleeved cotton shirt against the early morning chill. I stepped a few steps to where I had left a white ceramic bowl of bran flakes and milk on the railing. I picked it up and carried it toward the camera, leaning close. The sun was still low, shining bright into my face. I cradled the bowl in my right hand close to the lens. The other held the spoon.

I took a full spoonful of bran flakes, milk dribbling back into the bowl. A mouthful of chewing - slowly, thoughtfully - looking straight into the lens. The sun made me squint. Creases. Bags under those nearly closed eyes. My full cheeks and large nose, sunburned from the alpine hiking. White mustache, almost hiding my upper lip.

She would see my chewing. The camera might pick up the sounds. It was a face that would scare children, but it almost never did. I could never figure that out. A large, red-faced old man. Old enough to know better. I sometimes practiced stretching and twisting my features and bugging out my eyes in the bathroom mirror. How could the neighbor girls, Alia and Maya, Ginny and Sidra not see me as I appear? As I am?

But this video would be for Dawn. She would somehow see me smiling in just the imperceptibly upturned corner of my mouth. Maybe she would see me laughing behind my eyes.

I ate my bran flakes and cold milk, looking at a woman I had loved for thirty years – if only in my imagination on this morning from five hundred miles away. I stepped to the camera and pressed the button to stop the recording.

Let’s call it art with a small ‘a.’ It was more and less than that. I cut off the front and back of the video footage on my computer and attached the self-portrait to an email. The subject line said, “Good morning, Dawn.”

Her reply, the next morning: “Hilarious.” She said that she thought I had an endearing face. How do some people see that in me? I had looked carefully at the video. One big red face. Piggy eyes.

I had recently seen a sketch – a self-portrait of a young woman. I could see life in the few marks she made around the eyes. She had posted a two-dimensional image on a digital screen.  And still there was life. I said something about it to her and she said that after looking into a mirror for a long time, some feeling must have shown through.

It’s as good an answer as any. Tomorrow, I’ll be home. I’ll have a bowl or two of bran flakes and cold milk. Oh, Dawn will say something. She’ll tell me she missed me. She’ll touch my face. She must see something behind my eyes. I’ll laugh as I take another bite of cereal. And I will slurp the way she has heard me slurp a thousand times before.

But love is not about counting. It’s about looking somewhere and seeing something, somehow. I’ve seen it in other people’s eyes. Or maybe it’s my imagination. I think that there is an art to seeing well.

**

Okay, Avery. That’s my word sketch. Poet Billy Collins has said that to make the reader feel, the poet needs to be calculating. So, given our conversation, so far, let’s say that I was aiming for your heart. Not to tear it out, but that you should feel something as you read those few words – feel something about more than just my face. If I completely failed to touch you, I will be disappointed. But it’s just a little bit of art. And maybe it’s also about you. I had felt something as I worked on this self-portrait. I did what I could do. I am not responsible for what you feel. My answer to all of this, such as it is, is that Art happens somewhere – somewhere in between the artist and the person who appreciates a ‘work.’ Without some feeling on both ends, there is nothing but words and lines.

You and I are not clueless. We learn from what reaches our own heart and we work with our medium over time toward some thing that will reach others. We express ourselves – we add something we cannot grasp - and we hope to reach someone else. It’s a charade. Three letters, starts with ‘A.’ Or is it four, starts with ‘L?’

**

So do you want to see the snapshot from the video that I worked from?

But I want to consider the question I am asking myself? I often like to work – sometimes aiming at one reader. But now that I have made this sketch, do I have something to share more widely? I think that I still have time and work to do.

I’m going to say that you started this exchange, Avery. Inadvertently, perhaps. Oh yes, I jumped at the chance to play with my words and to play this sort of game with you. Kristina will probably tell you that I like to play younger than my mustache, but I have also ridden around the sun quite a few times.

Thank you for our conversation. But it’s really only a bit of our lives. We can keep playing, but we both have other things to do, too. And people to be with.

I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you again. This will be a little irregular, I realize, but I would ask you to give your roommate a hug from me. I miss seeing and talking with her. Or you could have her give you one from me, if you don’t think I am being too forward. Either way, I have a healthy imagination and more gratitude and affection than I know what to do with, sometimes. I try to put some of those feelings into the words that I write. I have seen some of your work. It seems clear to me that you have also glimpsed for yourself some of what I have tried to express in my work.

Sincerely,

a writer you barely know

P. S. link to self portrait