*
Self-portrait as Carmelite nun. The Carmelites are a silent order, and in this photograph we are given only the nun’s back. The photographer is interested in how the light caresses the folds of her long white wimple and soaks into the plain black dress. She casts a pale grey shadow on a white wall. Outside, the capital city is a ceaseless noise-floor, but within one hears the whisper of habits as they pass along corridors, the gentle open-and-close of a door. Listen closely enough and sometimes you will hear the light speak.
*
I think of the writer Jenny Diski, her wish to obliterate herself in Antarctica’s blank maxima while leaving her bird-tracks all over it. Eyes so dark they seemed black, and the silver-white sheen of her hair. The view from the bed where she liked to write. When I bought the photo of the nun, I chose between it and the photo of a rumpled sheet on a bed, which reiterated the photographer’s love for the way light bestows contours to an apparently featureless object. The way it gives praise to the surfaces we turn into records of desire. The same photographer would later travel to Antarctica and engage with the tricky business of registering white on white. Later again, the granular grey and white of her own father’s ashes.
*
Self-portrait as man with nautilus. This collage of engravings is an ancestor of the nikau frond figure (although I acquired it later). I think of the man as an 18th-century philosophe and the nautilus that hovers above his head, shot out of the blowpipe that bisects his face, as a natural creation of mind – a spiral poem, perfect urn, many-chambered and buoyant. Its effect, surprised laughter in a drawing room. (And underneath, the pleasure of that grasping Latin taxonomy.)
*
Self-portrait as Japanese woman in combat. Hair and kimono indicate that she too belongs to the court of a previous century. But her face is a blank oval: white space where features should be. Her opponent’s face is fully featured, angry, and his legs are braced to stabilise a defensive posture, hands raised as if to parry a blow, then return it. Her hands too are raised, but the gesture is not aggressive, although he seems to have taken it that way. The hands seem to be reasoning, showing she intends no harm, but the implacable oval has frightened him. They face one another in a landscape of gentle hills, trees, water; in the background, an island.
*
Grace Paley would be unhappy with me if I failed to mention she was a peace activist. And there were plenty of things she knew. For instance: she knew she only went to prison symbolically, but living on the cell block, if only for a time, gave her knowledge of a whole other continent of deep prison that she needed to be concerned about.
We all have mothers we do not wish to displease. They are not always our own.
*
[Brief interval for the customary self-loathing to come and go.]
*
The two-dimensional oval has been composed to repel boarders, to make the grappling hooks slide off. On a biological level, it occurs to me now, blank is a form of the freeze that some prey put faith in to escape the predator. A Switzerland of the soul, conferring the advantage of survival by limiting the possibilities of engagement.
Wayne Koestenbaum offers me the alternative reading, derived from the artist Eileen Maxson, that beneath a neutralised face may lie volcanic intensities.
*
What I love best: the velvet black of the lithograph that 3Ds the paper’s plane into deep space, as if black were a warm bath one could sink into. Or a space-time origami. A place where one can step into the endless night of story and imagine the characters. An invitation to the all-time no-time of dreaming. It has the pillowy density of feathers.
*
Self-portrait as Punch and Judy. The first piece of art I ever bought, and I have spent decades seeing then increasingly not-seeing it. Printed in small capitals beneath the image are the words ‘Another night at home’. What did I know back then, without knowing that I knew?
On either side of a doorway sit the stay-at-home couple, a Punch and Judy who appear to have lost the crude vigour and violence of their puppet show originals. Looking through the lithograph’s central doorway at the backstage area I find that sketchpad memory has not fully rendered the complex situation there. What I thought was a single column emerging from a hole in the floorboards is in fact a double column made from two logs. The logs have grown faces that stare in opposite directions, and arms that dive under the floorboards to reappear in the picture’s foreground, where one hand holds Judy’s, and the other holds the stick that props up Punch’s chin.
The pedestal on which the double column rests is formed of another two torsos, back to back in black, but where heads should be there is a black band of flesh with a single pair of eyes peering out. And atop the column, presiding over the entire picture, two arms strapped to tiny cardboard wings rise up on either side of a child’s drawing of a clown-face, a kind of winged victory arisen from the crawlspace under the floorboards.
This is all so psychodrama that I can leave you to your own conclusions. But what if, instead of uncovering what I didn’t know I knew, this image predicted everything I became?
*
Paley:
The writer is not some kind of phony historian who runs around answering everyone’s questions with made-up characters tying up loose ends. She is nothing but a questioner.
*
Returning to the foreground, I spy a tiny vestigial Punch, little more than an outline cordoning a white shape that holds a truncheon, popping out from backstage on Judy’s side of the doorway. Ghost of the woe that is in marriage – he’s be-hind you!
*
Again perhaps Wayne Koestenbaum offers a gloss:
The surrounding gray or white fog threatens to obliterate the figure. You can call the fog beautiful, or you can ignore its grisaille. The fog condenses everything you will never be able to name or remember. The line – the last survivor, always the same–resists erasure, including the erasure I might commit by deciding not to side with its wiry or fat proclamations.’
