Behind the beach the track goes past a natural spring which leaks out of a tannin crease in the land. From there it becomes a contour line, winding around an exposed hillside, whereupon it further narrows. To the width of a human foot. But I feel good going on, aware now of a strange but comfortable presence. Up ahead, just out of sight, someone is confidently walking on. At first I am happily puzzled, then just happy when it comes to me who it is. My doppelgänger.
Around another bend, with the end still not in sight, the path becomes such a thin dirt thread and so precarious, it’s hard to know what sort of creature could use it without falling into the sea. I have no choice. I must stop. But the figure from my baroque novel walks on, for the time being at least, without me.
•
To ‘see’ (and therefore understand) something others don’t, the creative ego must take a solitary journey.
The journey is often styled as a visit to the underworld; as if, in order to realise a new thing, the artist must make it from the anti-matter found in a place of disembodiment and shadows. The journey entails risk: the traveller might experience terrible things that cannot be forgotten, they might lose themselves for a time. They might not return at all. The unique thing the artist brings back is the reward for stepping outside safe boundaries. But there are no guarantees. Will the effort have been worthwhile for what is produced? And how will what is produced be received? The thing retrieved might be something beautiful or heretical—or ephemeral; the artist does not know before they set out and doesn’t always get to choose.
Art historian Joseph Leo Koerner says: ‘Melancholic and estranged, the artistic ego, turned inward and against itself, becomes the object of personal and social sacrifice: personal sacrifice through single-minded devotion to its calling; and social sacrifice, due to its being perennially misunderstood.’
The self-portrait painter unavoidably gives expression to these issues and the mixed feelings to which their vocation gives rise. They may ask how art acts on their person; and what is this strange, animating force that gives them such purpose, but which causes trouble and pain?
Inevitably, the artist must also wonder how they would live without art, and who they’d be then. At a moment’s notice, or by long-drawn-out means, art might desert them. Bereft, abandoned: the spectre of that person haunts them.
•
TIMER-SELFIE-CLICK. I go home, click, read, click, write up my art-book notes, click. I go for a mini-walk to the extension wharf, I shower, I make dinner, eat, click, click, click-click, click. The last shot of the day is of me standing outside the open doorway to the bedroom, with the bed in the background. CLICK.
Tonight I will sleep again for another seven or eight hours of videoing. The close-up this time.
I shut the bedroom door. Turn off the bedside lamp. Small in the high left-hand corner of the watching dark: twenty red dots.
•
In the morning, while I transfer the new sleep footage, I write up the dreams I can recall from the past two nights. Though it’s hard to see what use they’ll be, it seems best to note them just in case, when I’m looking through the vision, I see disturbances which look like dream activity. If I make some distinctive movements or talk in my sleep, maybe I can match them up.
Usually I don’t dream much, or not that I remember, so I’m quite surprised to be able to write down four in all. While they are very different in setting, ranging from a frozen landscape to a hotel lobby, one thread is amusingly common. In each dream I am resistant to authority: mildly but firmly refusing to obey, or repeatedly putting my case when ignored—even when threatened by a third party to desist, ‘or else’. In one I am pursued across sparsely treed snowfields by two soldiers on state-of-the-art snowmobiles. The soldiers should be intimidating—not just because of their machines, but because they wear black samurai armour. Their task is to arrest me. But I’m not worried. They won’t stop me. At modest speed, across the snow, on my inferior contraption, I motor off.
•
Next I pack up the camera gear. I find myself doing it fondly, even reluctantly. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I used to be a TV camera operator—in the 1980s; it was my first real job—and though I haven’t done that work for decades, the equipment has felt pleasingly familiar in my hands. On my first day up here, when I attached the camera to the head of the tripod, I instinctively reached underneath to level it, and yes, there it was, the nut to loosen the head, and yes, there it was, the spirit level bubble. Rock the bubble into the black circle it belongs in and lock it off.
As I pack up now I drop the legs of the tripod efficiently. Like an old pro. Like the old pro it’s hard to believe I ever was. A me that’s so long gone, and yet a me that my body still remembers.
I’m about to shut the lid on the camera box but at the last second I obey my hands. They want to hold the camera one more time. They know they might not get the chance to hold as good a one again and they want to take it and make it move.
I scoop it up, power on the viewfinder, press record. Steady, I hold the floating frame and I walk it through the house to show it every room. Let this be a record. Here’s how this dear house looked on this sunny day, the ninth day of April in the year 2018.
I show it every wall, lingering on those where maps of the estuary hang. I show it the floors and the furnishings. Here’s the backyard, too, with its clothesline strung between two posts, here’s what you see when you’re sitting on the outside dunny with the door open. Here’s where the car’s parked (my 1998 Toyota Camry) under the overhanging bough of next-door’s jacaranda. Here’s the grassy knoll out the front which looks so fine when it’s mowed, here’s the road, here’s the bay. All of this is the background to the portrait of me.
I’m giving it all to the camera. Take it in your frame and keep it from Time, which moment by moment wants to replace it with something else.
•
I transfer the vision and load the car and go. In the city, I stay just long enough to return the gear to the hire place, then I head straight back up the coast.
This afternoon I will look at all my selfies and, finally, the night footage.
•
Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been left borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant from palaeolithic times to cubism, from Tintoretto … to Rothko. The act of faith consisted of believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen at a glance. Thus paintings were there to reveal a presence behind an appearance—be it that of a Madonna, a tree, or, simply, the light that soaks through a red.
John Berger said that.
•
The chequerboard of the 113 thumbnails of the selfie day fills my computer screen, beginning in grainy near-darkness with the first photo, taken almost the moment I pulled out of sleep.
I find I am older-looking than I thought. My face is permanently sleep-pushed from my habit of lying heavily on one side. This pulls the right eye socket down. In some photos this is quite marked and echoes a boxer’s, slanted and puffy. The asymmetrical face can appear worn out and even sad, but when there’s a hint of a smile playing in my brown eyes, a sharpness switches on. I look better when I’m wearing my reading glasses. They hide the plasticine extremes of the face, which include the deep, dark-ringed eye sockets I’ve always had. Prematurely, my throat is starting to lizard. And when my mouth is open my capped tooth at the front is obviously whiter than the others. It’s something that people who know me well will have forgotten, but that a little kid would notice and ask a parent about later. My hair, which has recently been cut shorter than I’ve worn it in a while, is a messy, dyed-blonde seagull’s nest; sometimes a thick strand hangs over a corner of my glasses.
In all of the pictures, when I’m not in my Kmart nightie, I’m wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt.
&n
bsp; Gorgeous. But an assessment of attractiveness was never the point. The fact is I’m ageing, and not very well. But as I flick through the pics, I see some where suddenly, in the right light, without any prior tending or preening at all, youth is magically restored. I am pathetically grateful for them. Oh, she’s still there! The me I better recognise, the more vital one that better matches the me of my mind. Within the course of a day, both these outward selves must come and go, randomly showing themselves to others, while I, of course, have no idea whose turn it is to be in charge.
So much for my appearance.
What do I learn of my character?
It’s hard to say. Probably not much. Because of the task, and because I’m not posing and therefore not animated or smiling much, because of my keen brown eyes and the one eyebrow higher than the other, I do tend to look like a person who by nature likes to look intently. This seems especially so when I flick through the photos fast, because my eyes are the one consistent anchor point in each picture. Behind that intent look is sometimes something smart, indicating a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Quite often there’s a hint of amusement or relish at something quizzical. Sometimes amusement is tempered by a touch of melancholy, of self-contained acceptance of … what? … Of the facts. The facts of what? … The fact of the existence of complications.
Among my 113 photos, the closest I get to accidentally replicating the feedback loop of the painter’s mirror is in one that’s an extreme close-up. It was taken inside the house but you’d hardly know it: the background is mostly burnt-out white light from the long-room windows. I’m wearing my reading glasses and in each lens there’s a small rectangular reflection of the lit phone screen. These tiny, white, transparent reflections sit over my brown irises. The face is calm, but the ‘look’ in those eyes is indeed that of someone trying to intently locate a place that will give something back.
•
‘The quest of the self-portrait is to find something out about art.’
I said that.
It reminds me of what I came to think about the baroque period, after researching it for my novel. The baroque, I decided, pulls out all the stops trying to give you every single thing art could possibly offer, and yet it fails; because there’s some pure thing at the heart of art that can’t be wholly communicated, it can only be glimpsed in parts. The baroque wants to wrench that core thing from its socket and triumphantly hand it over. But it’s not possible. This, I concluded, is the real message the baroque has for us. It can’t be done.
In the history of art, the subject of art itself is an inexhaustible topic. What is art? What does it tell us? Where is it?
John Berger’s statement about art’s pledge to deliver the secrets embedded in the visible was made in a piece he wrote about Jackson Pollock. He said of Pollock:
Jackson Pollock was driven, by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism which was frenetic, constituted the suicide.
The suicide he refers to there is the suicide of Pollock’s art. Within or beyond Pollock’s pictures, Berger says, ‘… there is nothing. Only the visual equivalent of total silence.’
•
After the selfies, I watch the night footage. No one else will ever see it but me.
In the green swimming pool of the NIGHTSHOT I put myself to bed. The covers rustle as I flip the thick doona lengthways over to the other side of the bed: it’s too hot for now. The white sheet and the cream thermal blanket over it will suffice. They sculpt closely to me as I turn onto my right side facing the middle of the bed, eyes shut, legs bent; my form the stylised shape of a Pompeii body.
I seem to fall asleep immediately. I do not move.
I’m watching in real time and the longer I watch myself not moving, the more the silence of the room builds to become something distinctly uncomfortable. In the quiet of my stasis, time stretches and stretches, and swells and swells, to become a controlling atmosphere that owns the night. To keep watching is unbearable: I slide through the vision to speed it up. Finally, I move in the bed, after more than an hour.
Over both nights, my sleep follows the same pattern: I go to sleep quickly and sleep soundly for long stretches, mostly only disturbed by temperature changes. If I get up and go to the toilet, I fall back to sleep quickly. Throughout the night I hardly make a sound: I don’t snore (although I know I do sometimes because I’ve been called out at it in front of the television); twice I hear myself fart—loud and comfortable. I cannot see when I’m dreaming, although sometimes in the close-ups I think I can detect REM flickers under the eyelids, but it’s hard to be sure. In the green light my skin is uniformly pale and smooth.
Only when you look very carefully can you see my breaths move the bedclothes where they cover my chest. Otherwise I sleep so peacefully you would not know I was alive. In the wide shots, when I look at that body, I see a cicada shell. So empty does it seem of anything. It reminds me of another line of Berger’s about Pollock: ‘On these canvases the visible is no longer an opening but something which has been abandoned and left behind.’
In the close-ups I look like my mother. People who knew her always said so, especially as I got older. In the homogenisation of the night vision we replicate faces more than we have ever done, especially now it turns my blonde hair white like hers. But it’s not just hair colour that further matches us up. It’s the shapes the hair takes, the waves and strong half-curls that have re-emerged since my recent cut. I remember them from her. And when I see the back of my head I’m shocked to see that my hair springs from the crown exactly the same way as hers did when pillow-messed. It seems too intimate a thing to have noticed, an invasion of the privacy of both of us, and yet it is true. Yo lo vi. I saw it during her last illness. Those last long days when she withdrew into herself to cope with the pain.
She/me turns on the pillow to lie flat on her back in what is the most death-like repose of each of the nights. Sharply profiled. White-faced. In the underwater light she lies there, plainly seen. But think! In truth, thick dark covers her. Dark that fills the volume of the room.
•
I have been to the other side of the night to see myself and must report back: there’s not much happening.
After watching the seventeen hours of video, the only understanding I arrive at is that I don’t have any attachment at all to the person on the screen. This much is very clear. Were it not for the way that person’s body remembers my mother’s, I would feel entirely indifferent about her. I have no special bond with or fondness for her, nor do I find her innocent oblivion in any way special or charming. Neither do I worry for her, despite her extreme vulnerability. Even the dead-looking me in the sepulchre does not affect or disturb me. I feel nothing. And when I watch the waking self slowly returning to consciousness, I continue to feel nothing, though I recognise the ritual movements as mine and remember being inside those moments.
And the selfies? I did not catch myself unawares, I see in them no hidden thing. Nothing is revealed. What I have seen in both of my experiments is merely a body in time.
Jackson Pollock saw no hidden thing. His art was in present tense, all in the wild moment, depicting the creative energy of its making. When his energy failed, as it must, the great silence, always waiting out the back, thundered in. That is what killed him.
•
I watch myself wake in the pre-dawn on the second morning once again. The irises of my eyes—turned into black beads by the green cast—look glassy and very strange. A white highlight drills a pinpoint in each.
I watch myself yawn. I watch myself turn on my side, go still, and think. Remember—although the vision is crisp, that’s due to the camera’s NIGHTSHOT setting. In truth, it’s very early, the curtains are closed and the room is still ver
y dark. I’m thinking in the dark: I have my eyes open in the dark.
My black bead eyes flick up to the twenty dots of the infrared light; I stare. I watch me watch the red dots. The twenty red dots that seem to do nothing.
You must get out of bed.
That is the message of art.
Keep looking.
Bucket of Fish
It’s an all-or-nothing strategy today. I’m using up the last bits of bait from the freezer—there wasn’t much there—so I’ve bypassed Rileys to head straight for the Hole.
It’s late autumn and this will probably be the last time I go out for a couple of months. It’s getting cold, and wading out to launch the Squid is a chilly proposition. More to the point, the good tides are just about gone. During winter the high highs only occur at night-time.
The season has been reluctant to change, but now it’s on its way: under wharves mullet huddle. Heavy with eggs and milt they wait for the next big rains to flush the estuary with fresh water and send them to sea. Next time I come back up the coast they’ll be gone.
Like a shop, the afternoon is closing down. The breeze has a sharp edge to it. Only the eccentric or the foolish would be out, which explains why I’m the only one here. Though my face feels scrubbed by the cold I’m toasty enough, bundled up in a jumper and a waterproof jacket. I nearly didn’t make the effort to come, but I’m glad I did. The Squid rides fine at anchor and the fishing’s been good. Every bait I’ve sent down has brought up a small snapper, until it seems I’ve pulled up my own sunset in fish. Metallic rose-and-aqua-speckled, they gleam in my hands. So far two have been big enough to keep: plate-sized beauties.
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