silent portrait

I stare ahead into the snowy silence of the sheet. See a sight that at once blinds me with its whiteness and deafens me with the extremity of its sound. The blankness of its stare maddens me. Its virginity is a perfection that aggravates me. The page seems like a mentally empty phrase that lives, indistinctly, between the spaces of silence. Soon—I assure myself—once my voice feels, the page will no longer be so isolated. The sheet will no longer resemble a virgin’s skin when my pen marks it with the depth of a mature woman. Once the penetration of my hand against the stillness of its exterior breaks the surface and makes my interior ink bleed, I will be made known.

The sun is plummeting behind my back, as the tight stretch of the sky loosens and lets it eventually descend into the grave of the night. Our eyelids will fall with it and time will not object or wait for me. I must rush to begin, and make the most of the light that is left that helps me see myself. A shadow falls over the page, like a stranger at my back, but it is only me waiting to begin my portrait, mixing the paints that will give color to my character and brightness to my life.

A collection of photographs lay baking underneath the warmth of my eyes. I laugh in indulgence at their appearance—how these photographs of ages seem more like evidence of the scatterings of my mind and a series of selves, than an adolescent documentation of glamour shot visits. I have a transformative quality that is undeniable. Yet these images of style account for a manner of thought, rather than speak of a suit I was colored by or my generation rebelled for.

These images are fixated by a format that encloses me in a place in time and captures an expression of an instant, perhaps nothing more than a fleeting moment, maybe even a lie I acted when the camera’s eye was present. How accurate can this representation be of me? How effected can one become from the little evidence a picture reveals? There is no conscious thought that radiates because the anticipation for the flash stopped the speech of the subject. I want to know words—I want to see how I sound.

My psyche reads like text, I can see that it does. It is in myself—and nowhere else—that my true meaning can be found, discovered and attended to. My memories of these selves that are strung out before me in pictures are markings that are as insubstantial as the fine traces of a portrait. Can’t you see, I choose one to paint: one side of my face, one gazing of my eye, one color for my hair and give you a packaged portrait of one persona, while all my other characters disappear into the vague mystery of unbeknown truth. But I want you to know all of me, if you are to know me at all.

Within the fictitious framework of my portrait, I hope to place the essence back into my body from which it was exuded. I hope my body that is restored within the frame of this art can be crystallized by its profound interior change. I hope my subliminal self is who will rise to surface, rather than a model that is formed and fabricated by fashion. I hope my words will fall on to the page, like petals falling off a rose—giving less and less form to an object of idealization, because I am not perfect and neither is the rose, but we both can show and be loved.

I avoid the mirror of reflectivity, knowing by now that I won’t fall like Narcissus into the pool of himself. No, my appearance is someone I am challenged by, not someone that I love—at least, not immediately. I have always had a waking dream of a world where there are no mirrors, a world where thought is not driven or influenced by sight, but by the sensations of touch and levels of feeling. In imagining this world, I assume that I will love it and that I will love my self that lives there. Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to paint a portrait of myself when it relies heavily on sight. It is the visual image of myself that terrifies me. And if I was forced to come too close in contact with it, I would suffer from my consciousness spiraling out of control. I would paint scars—the sickly engravings that have weathered around my thighs and remind me (over and over) of my rise in weight, and how the exact moment I took notice of them changed my perception of myself forever.

Staring over it, the paint would run as my tears moved it to ruin. On paper I would grow into a different woman—enlarged by the superficiality of exterior impressions and yet, wholly diminished by the conflicting view motivated by self-analysis. Whether accurate or inspired by my own self-invented myth, the appearance I believe I am covered by lacks sensibility. It is shaded by a materiality, I am long since removed by and that deters me rather than defines me.

Finding how my body as an image was a personal portrait I repressed, rather than used to impress, helped me decide that it was an object of speculation—that of varying degrees of truth and fiction. And because of its nature, my body was something that I was very much inside of, but something I could not rely on for concrete conveyance.

It is often said that you can tell something of a person’s life by observing their body. At first I resisted this phrase with tears, and then I was also told that if I could not survive in this world, I had better make a world of my own. I began writing because it helped me contain the tears and see with clarity. Once I developed into myself as a writer, I started building the world I needed—the world I wanted to live in, where I succeeded, where I shined, where I stood confidently. Now I have no qualms or insecurities about someone observing my body. I give them my body of art, show them the psyche of my text and have the essence of my words pervade their perception. Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, “The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather a work of art.” Well, here is my body—an art I will forever be working at. You will find, it is the materials of my mind that matter.