Self Portraits and other stories

 It turned out I was reading Milan Kundera in the last few weeks of his life. It feels significant somehow but absolutely isn't. He was 94 and until I looked him up to check, I hadn't been sure while reading him whether he was a living author or not.

Things that 'seem significant' but aren't suggests itself as a theme for a poem, or some such thing. It's the levels of irony that are attractive. Surely by writing a poem one is making it significant. Ah, but, it's the undermining of that supposed significance that is significant. It's as endlessly enjoyable as something by Derrida, or maybe Michael Donaghy who continues to amuse with bedtime poems explained by Don Paterson.

One needs at least two ideas, ideally three, to make a poem. Laura Cumming's A Face to the World, on Self-Portraits, includes several of her favourites that she wrote more about in later books- Velazquez, Durer, Rembrandt and that Gerard ter Borch but it's mainly a Sartrean essay on beings-for-themselves, for-others and all that labyrinth that Structuralism seemed to do away with and, she suggests, the idea of 'self' was a Renaissance invention and, like titles for paintings, was unthought of in the Middle Ages. I'd have to see about that. Ovid appears to have had a sense of himself, to the extent that our 'O' level set text was a selection called Ovid on Himself.

 

One finds oneself wondering what to read next when approaching halfway in a book, which was roughly when Laura introduced the idea of a 'monumental' biography of Rembrandt and, finding that at about £3.50, it's on its way as opposed to Rothko or the Colony Room Club. Rembrandt isn't quite my favourite painter in the same way that Shakespeare isn't quite my favourite writer but perhaps they both should be. However, in this summer downtime from live music and the ongoing difficulties of wondering whether poetry is really 'up to it', maybe I take a few further steps into painting as long as I can find guides like Laura Cumming to tell me what I'm looking at because I can't always see it for myself.

I did find a suitable vehicle to carry the idea about 'significance', though, in Vuillard's Self-Portrait in a Mirror with a Bamboo Frame. Or, more properly, the painting attached itself to the poem and somehow justified it afterwards. One reason for not bringing in Vuillard is that there's already a Thom Gunn poem based on one of his paintings. Another is that there are about 20 poems now, since The Perfect Book, not all of which are likely to make it into any further book but it soon becomes clear that many of them are based on people, mainly artists of one type or another, as if it's only one trick I'm capable of performing. I don't know. If the poems are good enough and not all the same it shouldn't be a reason not to go ahead with them but it does give a 'critic' a way in, as many years ago one reviewer once found. But if one only sets out to please oneself - that old 'self' again - that shouldn't be a problem.

At least, whenever the 'self' came about and subsequently reached its high point in C19th Romanticism, some C20th artists have seen fit to subvert the idea - maybe Joyce, for example - but like anything else, once it's been invented it can't be uninvented.

But I can type a first draft of the poem here, almost 'live' on the internet, as Will Self ( ! ) once really did. It's incredible, isn't it, how these things can all be linked together but it's also inevitable, there being so many things in the world by now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self Portrait

 

Vuillard

 

It might not make one stop and think.

Why would it. Just the blurry face

of someone who stopped and thought 

about themselves. What vanity,

as if one is obliged to thank

them for this audience, this place 

assigned to view them from, this sort

of chance, this opportunity.

But, then again, the face is blurred

which perhaps makes one stop and think

what they did such a painting for.

They could be taken at their word,

who made themselves so indistinct,

thought about it but still weren't sure.