Self Portrait

Lately I’ve been drawing owls—amazing creatures with forward-facing eyes (they’re hunters, with no predators, so they don’t need eyes on the side of their heads like other birds), whose disk-shaped faces act exactly like the satellite dishes that we put on rooftops, capturing the slightest sound; whose enormous retinas, at the end of an elongated eyeball, give them the superhero vision of which we humans can only dream. And their ears! Get this. One is slightly higher than the other, a feature that allows them to precisely measure the depth of unseen prey—a mouse beneath a layer of snow.

Before owls, I drew elephants, and before elephants, foxes. I spent weeks getting to know those clever, nimble, elegant animals, bold and untameable, wary of humans. After about fifteen drawings, I found myself creating a picture of my own: a wily old fox looking out from behind a featureless human mask, allowing himself to be seen; and the mask was held by a human hand. 

That’s me, I realized. Not just the fox, or the mask, or the hand: all three, together. That’s the person whom I have become.

**

I’m planning to get the unmasked fox tattooed on my right arm next month. It will be a big tattoo, to allow for the detail of the design, and there’s a lot of color—so it will fill my upper arm in more than one way. It won’t be my first tattoo, although it may be the last. Certainly, it will complete that arm. 

I know that it’s a bit unusual for someone from my background, and in my age group, to have tattoos, especially visible ones. None of my friends do, and one or two of the people close to me hate them. But I love them. They feel right. I’m putting my artwork on my arms, and It’s all part of becoming: of asserting an identity that is peaceful, yet hard-won. 

It’s a bit like changing my name—something I did more than twenty years ago, when I first came into my power. I grew up hating the name my parents gave me. They called me “Gerald”, a name that I always felt—rightly or wrongly—was somehow prissy and ball-less—and then, oblivious of inconsistency, they nicknamed me “Jerry” spelt with a “J”. People were constantly misspelling my name to match my initials, and if I hated “Gerald” I hated “Gerry” even more. On top of that, my middle name was a family surname, beloved of a grandmother who cherished the imaginary glory of her British colonial past, and it was also Dad’s name; and at a certain point, as I came to terms with his legacy, I decided that, no, I really didn’t want to have the same name as he.

So I changed them both. 

I was strategic about it. Since lots of people knew me as “Jerry”, a name I didn’t particularly mind, and since I loved the big, heavy-duty prophetic name of Jeremiah, with its grand seventeenth century long “I” that’s the name I chose. There were, necessarily, religious implications as well. If people insisted, they could still use “Jerry”—but fussy Gerald and ball-less Gerry would be gone, not to mention the relic of an imperial connection that I despised.

Changing your name is surprisingly painless: long gone are the days when a public process was required, with notice of your intention being posted in your local village. The irksome stuff comes afterward, and nobody warns you about that. How you have to get a new birth certificate, and a new health card, and a new driver’s license, in that order, with weeks between; and then there’s the passport. Beyond those necessary documents, there are the legal ones, plentiful at first, where you seem to be continually presenting notarized copies of that official change-of-name certificate. 

But then, after a couple of years, the activity dies down and you are merely yourself.

**

A counsellor for artists whom I consult from time to time likes to say that becoming ourselves is the goal of our lives. Not perfection. That’s becoming our “real” selves—and there’s an immediate paradox to such a statement, since we’re alive, and always adapting, always changing, always becoming, only fixed and definable at the moment of death. So she’s talking about a peaceful kind of self-acceptance, along with self-knowledge. And if that’s what she means, she’s right. 

I think that’s a pre-condition for happiness.

But here’s the thing. We construct our identities, the way we invent our gods. They don’t just happen. Unlike some extraordinary people who seem possessed by a singular ambition, I never had a particular roadmap. I did the best I could, as choices came along. I improvised. I made a lot of mistakes, some grievous. But just the same, there were a series of tough decisions and choices, where I could have gone some other way; and I am the product of all that. Maybe it’s like a dance, and time is the music, and we turn and leap and bow and improvise—and change. And that’s the thing I marvel at, now: how all that apparent improvisation, all those accidents, including the losses and disasters, should produce so happy a result, so different in its simplicity from anything I would ever have imagined, as a lost and dreamy kid—and yet so right.

I think, these days, of the protagonist of Camus’ incantatory last novel, La Chute, and how he wakes every morning seized by the excitement of a new day, seized by life. That’s what I feel. An old fox, wary of humans, setting aside the bland blue mask. And that ancient, time-worn hand is my own.