Self Portrait

The walls in the mirror were pale green. He took it down and propped it on a chair, the better to see himself. A single bulb in the centre of the ceiling cast its harsh light in stark shadows across his face. He sat for a long time with the drawing board on his knee, searching his mirrored features for inspiration, looking for anything resembling soul.

In reflection, he saw his few cheap books on the wooden mantel; second-hand books, their pages yellowed, the shelf painted and re-painted with years of shabby strokes

Behind him: containers on the draining board, half-filled coffee jars, the left-over preparations of hasty meals, unwashed dishes, dishes left to dry.

In one corner: a cupboard door, open, with its tarnished towel rail; on gritty shelves, a meagre collection of corner-shop goods, mismatched cutlery, ill-assorted crocks, crusted pans.

Draw what you see, he had thought but, now, seeing was cloyed.  In the grim light of this one-bulb interior time stood transfixed. His crabbed fingers, his whole hand, refused to move. He stared at his face, stared and stared until his eyes blurred.

His face concentrated behind round specs, his hair, worn long in the fashion of the time, framing it, Two decades gone and counting, bearded like Ginsberg, he harboured pretensions to anarchy and art. Here was the poet, pencil in hand, the artist and his pen describing what he was; describing what he thought he was.

He drew and drafted: a face only a mother might love, the bevelled mirror's edge, the garish room, an image reversed, random marks on paper, perspective never quite right. He replaced the mirror and went to bed.

As he slept, time moved around him; the future itself sketched, hollow in the bedroom. He woke, repeated the waking until. in time, as in all dreams, the mirror was left behind and eventually forgotten.

On any mirror the silver becomes tarnished, its capacity to return an image dulls.

He had kept the self-portrait. It was silvered now more by memory than by reflection. He had taken it with him, framed it and hung it on walls, to gather veils of dust behind which its glass reflected the dimming light of so many unremarkable rooms.

The artist as a young man had been sealed into the semi-dark of history. Like the portrait, the artist himself faded, became time-stained and wrinkled, like a pressed leaf in a book of parchment. Thin as tracing paper, translucent.

Much later, on a day like so many others, he lifted down the frame again, lifted it gently from a wood-panelled wall above a wooden filing cabinet: another room, partially filled with memories, partially with junk, each bleeding into the other. Sometimes, he thought, indistinguishably.

The time for drawing was past, the art lost to him, a skill too far degraded to revive. Pen to paper was little more than a futile scrawl these fine days: pointless notes, pedestrian signatures, the autographs of officialdom.

He found that light was still important: still necessary to illuminate his image after the years had trickled away around it. He considered this, puzzled at it, stroked his ever-present beard. Eventually, he simply photographed it. In one brief motion, he committed it to a different kind of memory, present and electric, the old made new again.

He realised then that, after forty years, he was seated beneath another single bulb in a room, just as before. He held his camera up, held it like a mirror. In it, his face was  just recognisable, the light as hard, his expression still concentrating and similarly composed with the room at an angle, reflecting behind his now grey head. A table lamp stood on a metal filing cabinet, unlit. Above him hung a painting in oils, no work of his: a land- or sea-scape looking east across the sea. In one hand he was clutching, like before, pen and paper.

He tapped the virtual button.

He understood now how the present turned ino history. It had been receding from the very beginning, second by second: so much of it drifted and rearranged in the passing and yet how little of it ever actually changed. Only he, it seemed, beneath or beyond it all, had casually mutated.

© BH, 2017

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I drew the self portrait shown at the left here. That was a long time ago (about 1974). The main image is a current self-portrait for the digital age.

It suggested a starting point for a piece of writing and so a piece of writing evolved: a sort of attenuated self portrait, a musing on the nature of time between. 

Then it mutated it into a poem, Portrait of the Artist. Even more attenuated. 

I hardly recognise myself, by the way.