To get started, here's a poem from John Burnside:
II Self Portrait
The one thing you want to portray
is the one thing it lacks.
Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:
a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,
or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen
for longer than you had expected.
You do this again and again, as if your life
depended on nothing,
light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound
of shoppers and that constant sense you have
of some place less than half a mile from here,
a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone's bed,
the place you could be right now, with snow coming down
through neon, or that baize light on your hands
that makes you think of summers long ago,
the 'water's edge', the 'faint breeze in the pines',
those girls you really loved, before this patientBurnside reads this poem towards the end of this Start the Week podcast. Burns explains that the "look-alike" is the poet looking like himself as seen by others.
look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.
From near the end of Dear Denise:
Saturday,
June 30
This afternoon I visit the Frick Collection off
Central Park East. Another destination to pull me into the city and out of my
neighborhood. The promise of a nice dinner. Maybe I meet someone. Better chance
at a restaurant than in my house watching Tivo’d reruns of House.
I’m sitting on a bench in the West Gallery
staring at the Rembrandt self-portrait. A girl sits beside me. I’m writing my memoir , I want to say.
“I
need to work on the backstory. The main part, the flow from the big tragedy
until now, until the legal resolution and ultimate divorce, is pretty natural. Any
reader will have no problem staying with that narrative.”
The girl might ask what happened? What was the
tragedy? But if she didn’t, I’d just continue. “There’s a natural suspense. What happens to Denise? Is Libby going to
be ok? Someone close to me is saying I have to flesh out the backstory. I have
to make my life before clear. Early days with Denise. The first kiss. The
wedding. Then our family. Our perfect life together. Even up to the last night:
Jack shoulder to shoulder with me on his bed. We each read our own book.”
The Frick has many portraits, El Greco,
Vermeer, van Dyck. Portraits of women by Lawrence and Gainsborough. I sit with
the Rembrandt in front of me. “I lived in
Holland. Many, many times I’ve been to the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh. I have
history with the Dutch masters.” I take another tack. “Self-portrait is memoir.
At first glance Rembrandt seems fatigued. You can see his eyes, his life has
known sorrow.” He is not showing a reflection of the past; he is showing
his present. He had known fatigue but he is not tired in portrait. He is calm,
resolute. “Like the painter, who looks
for himself on the canvas, I write this memoir.” His oriental robe, red sash, is ostentatious. Is the portrait
true to his self? Is it a purely private truth or did he try to make it visible
to his audience?
“When
Jack was just a baby,” I continue, “he was ugly. His face was all scrunched up.
Big head. Looked just like a pug, or like Winston Churchill. Big head, big
brain, we said. And at about eight months, the ugly duckling turned. He became
Adonis. We loved him ugly. We loved him handsome and beautiful.”
“But
love,” I would ask the woman, tacking upwind. “What do you think about love?” My
voice would challenge. “You think love is always wonderful, always benign,
always a good thing?” She’d be silent in the force of my questions. “Denise
loved him too much .”
I wouldn’t be saying this. I wouldn’t be
talking about Jack that way. Not to someone I didn’t know. Not to someone I
just met.
₪
In Burnside's poem the problem with self portrait (introspection) is that it isolates the Self from the Others.To address this, Burnside layers in the outside world (observed and remembered): snow falling, the sound of shoppers or a piano.... We are social creatures. Without the outside world we are only partially ourselves, even as we strive to emulate the Self seen by others.
If our Self is defined by others, mine started with my parents, my sisters. Over time my others switch to Denise (behind Denise my colleagues at Lucent) and to Libby and Jack. In the memoir, I've lost Jack. I am breaking free of Denise and a yearning for new Others. In this scene I discuss Rembrandt and my memoir with an imagined woman.
In my memoir, I include letters to Denise. She is one reader, one Other. I hope you will be another. Even at the time, I knew those letters would make the backbone of my memoir. I knew they would stand watch against all the portraying and enacting in the narrative that surround them.
If our Self is defined by others, mine started with my parents, my sisters. Over time my others switch to Denise (behind Denise my colleagues at Lucent) and to Libby and Jack. In the memoir, I've lost Jack. I am breaking free of Denise and a yearning for new Others. In this scene I discuss Rembrandt and my memoir with an imagined woman.
In my memoir, I include letters to Denise. She is one reader, one Other. I hope you will be another. Even at the time, I knew those letters would make the backbone of my memoir. I knew they would stand watch against all the portraying and enacting in the narrative that surround them.