To be seen
Here is a truth of the world: every photographer wants to be photographed once in a while. Even as they raise their hand to the camera, turn their face away, pretend they’d rather not be seen. Otherwise, one day they’ll thumb through the albums and only see their past from their eyes, as if they weren’t there at all. They’ll wonder how other people saw them, whether they saw them at all. Sometimes the photos become the memories, and all that you remember about that party, that dinner, that bowling alley is what existed in the 4:3 aspect ratio box.
I imagine every artist has felt this — “what would it be like to be a muse for once, the subject rather than the speaker? Is my being even capable of inspiring something beautiful, or are these hands only good for sculpting or strumming?”
I’d rather focus on the work, but I can’t help but wonder what I am outside of the work. I’d rather focus on the work, but where does the artist end and the person begin? I’d rather focus on the work, but I can’t pretend I’m not egotistical and vain.
On the bus, I read poems and make my screen brighter, partially for me and partially for my fellow bus-goers to see how cultured and sophisticated I am. I buy too many clothes and take forever to get dressed only to wear the safest option most of the time because I’m afraid to be wrong. And then there’s the writing. It takes a level of vanity to not only make art, imagining thoughts are worth the ink or the data, but to ask for attention by pushing it through emails and social media posts. The internet holds nearly all of human knowledge, cat pictures and fossil records, Kurosawa and Gentileschi, but I ask for you to look at me instead.
At least part of me thinks that I’m doing something important. I fall in love with the idea that I have the potential to be Great, the way the epithets mean it. I fall in love with the feeling of perceived improvement, paint the creative process as spiritual growth. I know that very few people move towards self-actualization, but my ego thinks that I have a shot of figuring it all out through work. I imagine I am able to think more or better or differently from everyone else, in a way that makes me worth paying attention to.
But there’s insecurity in it all. I am a man who wants what men want: for someone to look through my eyes into the neurons and gray matter, to see all the way through to my molten center. I barely understand myself, but I’m trying to figure it out, clear things up so I can get them and someone else too.
It’s what creating art is about: grasping towards legibility for the things that by definition are illegible. It’s a belief that with enough skill, or enough essays, or enough tries, you’ll get closer to feeling understood in some divine way, let the light of another’s eyes shine over you. If art won’t save you, what will?
But then, sometimes you come home and have long meandering conversations with the people you live with. Sometimes, as you start to wax poetic about your newest theories about the nature of life, they say small things, remind you of the many hours spent sitting around on the couch watching sports and the parts of ourselves that we let out in the endless deluge of jokes, screams. And somehow, even though you mostly share your deepest feelings with faraway friends, despite the fact that you think that you can only really show yourself through your writing, these people remind you that they understand you.
I was touched by my conversations with my roommates this weekend, shooting the breeze in the living room among the rain’s unending migration towards earth. We spoke at length about things like fantasy football and conviction and meaning and anime and romance and science fiction and the ways that we did and didn’t understand them, or at least how we thought we understood them. We constructed theories that scientists would glower at and stuck them together with laughs and quips and let them disappear like fears in dreams as the lights dimmed.
And there was something like advice, words and directions and stories that could be useful but didn’t matter even if it was. As I was told that I lacked conviction in my approach to my romantic life, or was going about something completely wrong, I knew it was better than anything a book or a motivational speaker could ever give me. Everything I heard, everything I shared back dripped with another message: “I understand you, I think about you, and most of all, I want the best for you.”
It didn’t take a work of art to get to this point.
No, it was just living.
We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Green by Hiroshi Yoshimura - I couldn’t sleep last night but this album saved me
FILM - Mirror (1975) - dense, difficult to understand and wonderful film depicting the reflections of a poet on his deathbed.
POEM - “I Don’t Want to Lose” by Mary Oliver - I want to remember everything / Which is why I am lying awake