Self-Portraits
October 25, 2005
Self-Portrait as Cultural Creative, Whatever the Hell That Means
A few week agos, Jana took this quiz designed to gauge your world view and posted her results on her blog. A few days later her husband John took the same quiz and posted his results, and not so long ago Wayne followed the links in my webroll to one of those places and took the quiz himself, though he didn't post his results on either his first or second blog. Instead, he read me his results over the phone, and told me to take the quiz. So I did. Turns out I'm a Cultural Creative, and
Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
I didn't just score highest in the Cultural Creative category; I scored perfectly in it. I don't particularly know what the term means or how long it's been around, but I guess I really truly am one, if I buy into it 100%. I'm rather glad that "new ager" is not a category; I appreciate quite a few new age ideas, but there's so much annoying posture that goes along with being new age. As for the other terms, many of them don't mean to me what they seem to mean to the creator of this quiz, so I'm not sure how revealing the results are. To me, a Romanticist is someone who studies early 19th century British poetry (not many of those around these days) and a Modernist is what I almost became, someone who specializes in British and American lit written between the two world wars, and a postmodernist is a silly person who writes badly whose work you have to read in graduate school. At least I'm absolutely NOT a fundamentalist (which I would have predicted but am glad to have confirmed nonetheless). Anyway, here are my results:
Cultural Creative 100%
Idealist 94%
Postmodernist 69%
Existentialist 63%
Materialist 38%
Romanticist 38%
Modernist 19%
Fundamentalist 0%
If you take the quiz yourself, let me know how you score.
Posted by Holly at 7:57 AM | Comments (6)
October 24, 2005
Self-Portrait as Modest Desires
When I was finishing up my first master's degree, I saw a career counselor who told me I should figure out what I would want if I could have any kind of life at all. My desires were modest: I wanted to live alone in a pleasant house with lots of windows. I wanted to spend most of my day writing, alone. In the evening I wanted to get together with friends and eat pasta out of big pretty bowls, and then I wanted to go home alone. I didn't care whether or not I was rich or famous; I just wanted to be comfortable. I also wanted all of this to take place in Italy. And wouldn't you know I got it all, six years later, except that as far as the place goes, all the universe got right was the first letter: it happened in Iowa, not Italy.
What if I had wanted something grander, more elaborate? Why didn't I want something grander, more elaborate? One reason is, I think, that I was tired. Life had been pretty stressful up to that point and I wanted some peace. I wanted less to be expected of me.
At this point I'd like to want more. I want more to be expected of me and I expect more of me and I expect more of the universe. What, after all, am I allowed to want? That has been part of my thinking all along: If you have this, you can't want that. If you are a Mormon you can't want a life full of drugs and orgies. If you have even a certain level of enlightenment you can't want the ease of living a stupid, unenlightened life. Furthermore, if you want certain things, then you can't really want other things. If you want to eat whatever you want whenever you want no matter how many calories it has or what it does to your liver or your pancreas or whatever, then you can't really want to be thin and healthy. If you want to smoke then you can't really want to breathe well. If you want to be nasty to your neighbors then you can't really want to be enlightened. If you want to be a writer then you can't really want to be not a writer. If you don't really feel like writing then you must not really want to be a writer.
Some of those probably hold true and some probably don't. I want to want everything I can possibly want. I want to want so many things that I get at least some of them, even if they are contradictory.
Posted by Holly at 8:45 AM | Comments (1)
October 12, 2005
Self-Portrait as Recluse
A piece salvaged from old files, this was written in August 2001, when I first moved back to Arizona.
"People look better back-lit," my photographer friend told me. It's also true of mountains. This evening I rode my bike down to the Gila River a mile north of town, which involved passing the old sewer pond and the new wastewater treatment facility, both of which smelled especially bad, perhaps because it has been so long since it rained. The clouds were orange for a long time and then they were gray. The mountains had contours for a long time and then they were just a stark, dark outline before a diminishing brightness. I had never noticed before how the Pinalenos and the Santa Teresas look like a felled dinosaur, the head pointing southeast and the massive tail jutting northwest.
These two ranges, connected by a long, low ridge, look like they could be one mountain range, but they're geologically different, I'm told. The Pinalenos, which are taller and thicker and longer, have nothing in them worth mining. The Santa Teresas contain gold, silver, copper, etc, and if anyone wanted those minerals badly enough, they could get them out.
I haven't done anything exciting in the past eight years except: get a PhD, fall in love and get my heart broken, write a book. Each of these activities has hampered the rest of my life in certain ways. Getting a PhD involved being in graduate school in the Midwest for eight years. I hated many things about being in a PhD program, course work being at the top of the list, poverty running a close second. Once I finished course work and could just sit at home and read the books I needed to read for teaching or for research, graduate school became a lot less vile. I had lots of time but not a lot of money. I started to knit and quilt again. I took up yoga. I began to garden. All of that was enjoyable but it doesn't exactly rank high on anyone's list of huge thrills.
Then there was the "fall in love and get my heart broken part." I am still somewhat bitter about that whole enterprise, as it could have been avoided: I knew when I first met the guy that he had all kinds of problems and issues; I knew better but for reason that seemed good at the time and seem really lame now I went ahead and fell in love with him, and he went ahead and broke my heart. That pretty much destroyed my desire to date anyone else. It did, however, make me feel like I should just shut myself up in my house and write a book, which is what I did, and why I succeeded in getting the PhD--they don't give you one of those unless you write a dissertation.
The problem with writing that book was that it took over two years and I got fairly good at writing it but I forgot how to write anything else but it. Except for email, which doesn't count.
In the past eight years I have not: traveled out of the country; bought a car; been arrested; given birth; profoundly disappointed anyone I love (having done enough of that in the previous decade or so); left a church or a political party; joined a new church or political party; attended many rallies or demonstrations (preferring to donate money to causes I care about, because I hate crowds); saved any money; found a lucrative post-PhD job; published a book. I have: attended two funerals (my favorite great aunt and my grandmother died on the day after Easter and the day after the day after Easter, respectively, seven years ago); buried a cat I really loved after she was run over and replaced her with a cat I merely like; begun practicing yoga, which has many benefits but which, I am beginning to think, is one of the reasons I haven't done anything exciting: I have moments of inner peace and contentment and don't really feel the need to amuse myself with exotic activities or to seek out the company of very many people.
Either I am a bit reclusive or I am more content with solitude than most people, which are perhaps ways of saying the same thing.
Posted by Holly at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)
August 9, 2005
Self-Portrait Series
I love self-portraits, partly because in grad school I read this fabulous essay by Philippe Lejeune called "Looking at a Self-Portrait." Lejeune is a literary critic whose primary interest is autobiography, verbal and visual. He asks, "What is it that makes a self-portrait recognizable as such? What special interest can their be in looking at a self-portrait?"
Of course there is nothing in a painting that marks it as a self-portrait for anyone who does not know what the painter looks like, hence the existence of titles like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by Parmigianino (which John Ashbery borrowed for the title of one of his books). Painting, Lejeune points out, has no obvious first person, whereas "For the first person, writing is invincible."
Not long after reading that I started writing self-portraits: "Self-Portrait as Hungry Nude." "Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering." "Self-Portrait as Someone Who Looks Exactly Like Me."
I have this really fabulous book given to me by my big sister as a Christmas gift several years ago, called Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits. Some of the titles of the works depicted there are so thoroughly cool: "Self-Portrait Painting the Virgin and Child." "Self-Portrait at the Dressing Table." "Self-Portrait, Black Background." "Self-Portrait with Metro." And my favorite, by a painter named Cynthia Mailman: "Self-Portrait as God." (!) Some day I will steal all those titles and turn them into self-portraits in language.
Sometimes people call what I write stories. In the terminology of critics and writers, I don't write stories. I write nonfiction. I tell stories, but they are usually true stories, and the things I write about them are essays, memoirs and poems. I admit I have two ideas for novels I want to write, but they'll have to wait until I'm done figuring out my own life.
So what you'll get on this blog are lots of self-portraits. Self-portrait as Woman Who Can't Find Anything Worth Eating in her House on a Tuesday Morning. Self-Portrait as Insomniac. (I've done so many stinkin' versions of that one.) Self-Portrait as Someone who Simply Enjoys the Act of Typing. Self-Portrait as Someone with Something to Say. Because I want to say something that matters about the things that matter to me.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)