LXXIV, OR THEREABOUTS

Through his nightmare vision
He sees nothing, only well
Blind with the beggar’s mind
He’s but a stranger, he’s but a stranger to himself—Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I’VE SCRIBBLED MUCH IN THESE PAGES OVER THE YEARS about the challenge of doing something photographers both big and small do zillions of times per day, with widely varied results; attempt a self-portrait that actually tells the truth.

Knowing the kind of entertaining liar I can be at times, I always mistrust my results, as, when it comes to self-knowledge, I may be the ultimate “unreliable narrator” available for making an image of myself that is honest. Not that I haven’t tried. As decades of birthdays have come and gone, I’ve posed myself in both formal and casual settings, in search of some elusive quality of…. authenticity?……only to wind up feeling like, oh, hell, I’ll get it right next year…..

This time out, this February 8th, I saw the task differently, as I have just spent several months trying to regroup from a series of nerve injuries which included my forearms, a condition that made simple tasks like opening a pickle jar seem herculean. The temporary loss of strength and fine motor function in my fingers was especially depressing, since it wrecked havoc with my ability to operate a camera with any real degree of control. Suddenly, my artist father’s old teachings about hand-eye coordination came back to me in heartbreaking echoes. What if that linkage between what I could see and what I could execute were to remain forever severed?

And so, with mere days to spare before turning seventy-four, for me to actually get 99% of that back….well, it certainly clarified the terms of any birthday selfie I might normally have planned. No big costume changes, no symbolic props, just a simple document that my eye and my hand were back on speaking terms. No other kind of image seemed to make sense; I was crawling out of a hole in which normally conjoined parts of me were not connecting, and there could be no other visual depiction of that reconciliation than documenting the re-establishment of that link. Life, like photography, is often a game of inches, with all of us struggling to have our grasp exceed our reach, and when your fingers occasionally close around those goals, you’ve snatched the greatest treasure in life.