In my most productive fantasies, I am a long-dead painter. About a century after my death, an institution like the Tate Britain stages an exhibition. Glass boxes house my notes. On the walls: stenciled quotes of mine like “To reform the purpose of portrait […]” or “London ain’t no ‘Bama.” When the celebrities show up, one considers making a documentary on my artistic evolution, tells a trendy blog, and this brings even more viewers. The main attraction, though, the real reason people buy tickets and wait in lines on weekday mornings, is the room of self-portraits. The three of them. Each dated 2020.

Self-Portrait with “The Canterville Ghost,” January 2020 (Oil on canvas, framed, 36 x 36 inches). Gift of the artist, Tate. Permanent collection.

In this piece, I sit on a train in one of those seats with a table. From the viewer’s perspective, the window is to the left and the aisle to the right. I have chapped lips and am leaning to the side. Perhaps to glance down the aisle? In front of me, empty shortbread wrappers on the table. A closed book, an anthology of shorts, “The Canterville Ghost,” dog-eared in the center. In my eyes is concern, is a small bit of something that tells the viewer I am unsettled, yes, but still there is a goodness to me. This is all in the eyes, which are more amber than brown. Or maybe it’s more in the eyebrows. Or maybe it’s the flared nostrils and resolute chin that make the viewer feel that I’m about to stand up and rally a whole train of people. She’s about to start some shit. This is what the viewers say.

Source Material Self-Portrait with “The Canterville Ghost”

When I was on the train from Edinburgh to London, my first thoughts were about spices. I was on winter break from school and claimed a seat with a table, originally alone, with no one sitting beside or across from me. Once the train chugged into motion, I watched the tracks outside. The rusted rails looked like cinnamon sticks, and I pictured flurries of holiday scent puffing into the air with each train that passed the other way. 

My goal for the ride was to read Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost.” If you’ve never read it, it’s about a flailing ghost who is awful at being such and, instead of being able to scare the family who has moved into his home, he is given oil to lubricate his chains so as not to be such a peeve and is hit with pillows by precocious children. It’s a humorous ghost story, which is why I chose it. Edinburgh, though beautiful, had a definite tinge of death. The cemeteries did me in; none of the trees had leaves. On departing, I needed to cleanse my mind by reading horror-turned-joke. Thank you, Mr. Wilde, for making fun of ghouls.

It was forty minutes into the ride when I heard the screech.

The train stopped.

The guy who had relocated to the chair across from me looked down the aisle, raised his hand. “Wine? White,” he said to the lady with the cart.

Others exhaled into lazy postures.

Outside the window was a small town, a couple of cars on the street. We’d halted before reaching the station.

The conductor came over the speaker. “It seems we’ve –”

“We hit the man,” a child three rows away from me said. “Running man.”

“Actually, better make it two,” the wine guy said.

I set my book on the table.

“– and thank you for your patience,” the conductor finished.

I dug into my bag for the half-eaten shortbreads shaped like dogs. Looking back, it seems cold of me to have jumped to cookies at that moment. I am comforted by sugar. But it’s not that I needed comforting because I worried about the man we hit. It was clear from the conductor’s tone that the man was no longer a man but a body now. What worried me was the guy with white wine, the girl with her earbuds, the older woman asleep, the teenager thumbing over a screen. Our collective lack of concern was concerning. I know we couldn’t have done a thing to change the situation, and I suppose my crunching of buttery crumbles didn’t look great, either. Who could possibly empathize by biting the head off a dog, then the tail, the legs, the torso?

The one redeeming aspect of this memory is that I couldn’t bring myself to resume reading. After being so adjacent to another person’s death, I thought maybe it was rude to make fun of ghosts. Looking back now, I realize the running man’s death could have been a harbinger.

In “A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon,” Teju Cole notes that the urge to distinguish fiction from nonfiction is strange, that it is “not at all a natural way of splitting up narrated experience.” He continues to note that you wouldn’t peruse a museum trying to label the fictional paintings as separate from the nonfictional ones. You just wouldn’t do that, now would you? 

Yes, Teju, quick question: Can it matter if something did actually happen? Like if we write about a disaster that never occurred, that could be a tragic story for sure. But when we write about the one that is occurring, would we call that our story of tragedy? I’m thinking what you’d say is that both options are fine? Both are art? Both hold truth? We could write both, paint both, poem both, sing them all. It’s just that, while I’m stuck in all this occurring, I’m wanting to make a distinction between the tragic story and our story of tragedy. I’m wanting to know the difference. I’m feeling like it matters if something is happening. And I’m wanting my writing to know that too.

Why do you think that is?

Self-Portrait with The Grapes of Wrath, May 2020 (Oil on canvas, framed, 36 x 36 inches). Gift of the artist, Tate. Permanent collection. 

In this piece, I stand at a funeral. What looks like a black funnel is wrapped around my body. Behind me, fire. The flames, flecks. Beside me, a tiny man as small as a peppercorn sits with hands folded. The Grapes of Wrath floats above my head like a thought bubble. I cry. Only a couple of tears, though, a dignified bit of emotion on the cheek. I am accepting inevitable sadness in a mature way, a noble way even. She’s really captured the emotion, don’t you think, the complicated moment before pure immersive grief? This is what most viewers say. One of them interprets differently, though. I wonder if she sees that fire behind her. I wonder if she feels that heat there. 

Source Material Self-Portrait with Grapes of Wrath 

The first person I knew who died of the virus was not someone I knew that well, so her death was not affecting. She was a friend’s mother, who I never met, a smoker and absentee parent. She caught it early and succumbed with a ventilator on her face. At first, they thought it was the flu. I didn’t attend her funeral. By the time her death was ruled the virus, people snatched yeast from shelves, and none of us were allowed to congregate in large groups anymore. I sent an email to my friend and a text. So sorry to hear the news. He responded to neither, and then the actual news got worse.

The next person who fell victim to the virus was my boyfriend’s grandfather. Clarification: the virus didn’t kill him. It complicated his passing. We drove four hours to see him a handful of times before he died of leukemia, old age, a desire to see his wife again, and a general weariness of where the world was headed. 

Just as his belly was starting to cave in, he saw a segment on T.V. about that New York island where bodies are disposed of. He was on his bed, quilt folded down. “The last time I saw a mass grave,” he said, “was at Iwo Jima.” 

I didn’t respond. What is the social protocol for conversing about a person’s and country’s intertwined traumatic memories? 

Above us, squirrels chased each other on the roof. Family members in the kitchen discussed how to best dehydrate salmon, how to best can rice. 

It wasn’t the virus that killed him, but it was the virus that allowed only family at his burial. We sweated together under a forest-green tent. One of the cousins didn’t recognize me with half my face covered by fabric, and when the minister suggested we sing “Amazing Grace,” the funeral home director said we should not. 

“Singing sprays the germs,” he said. “It sprays them everywhere.” 

Instead, we stood. 

The last time I saw my boyfriend’s grandfather alive, as he wheeled his walker towards the bathroom, he asked me two questions.

One: “Take care of my grandson, will you?” 

Two: “I’m really leaving y’all with a mess, aren’t I?” 

His death was the first immediate loss, the first that affected our lives in a tangible way. I expected that one, though. 

The second was, relatively speaking, less expected. 

The deceased was my great uncle, who was 86 years old. He was found one morning in his bedside chair having just woken up, having just tied his shoelaces, having just stopped breathing. I don’t know if that is a true story, but it is the one that we were told. I wonder sometimes if he actually died before sleeping, and was not putting on his shoes, but trying to take them off. Or maybe he did die in the morning, but it was the morning before he was found. Then I wonder how long his body sat still in that chair. And how still? His funeral, like the other one, was limited to family. Extra rules for his wake: only ten in at a time, avoid hugs, wear masks. Again, no songs. An ambient fireplace crackled on a screen by the coffin even though it was 97 degrees outside. 

I cried when I walked in, which surprised everyone. I didn’t know my great uncle that well. When I was thirteen, I introduced myself to him at Thanksgiving, and he responded with “I know you.” I cried, not because of his death, but because he was only one year older than his brother, my grandfather. And when I walked in, I saw my grandfather sitting in a corner with his hands crossed. His suit was ironed stiff and too big for him. Shrinking, shrinking man. At that moment, I could only think of The Grapes of Wrath and how my high school teacher explained the deaths of the elderly characters.

“It was too different after the Dust Bowl, and,” she continued, “the older ones couldn’t survive that.” 

By this time, deaths had gone from thousands, to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, many of them elderly. 

By this time, I was very sure that it was rude to make fun of ghosts. 

In the novel 10:04, Ben Lerner’s protagonist spends his romantic dates trying not to answer questions about which parts of his recently published novel are “autobiographical.” Annoying for him, yes? Lerner’s protagonist’s narrator, though, experiences intense “anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation.” So as Lerner’s protagonist worries about how he presents in his world vs. how his narrator presents in his novel, Lerner’s protagonist actually becomes more and more like the narrator he so wants to be distanced from. 

So, Ben, listen. You are not your character. Your character is not his character. I am not mine. Right? But there is that worry of conflation. When do we become our words? And drawing attention to this issue in your novel with the idea of autobiography, doesn’t it seem like you’re asking for it? Is that the point though? Because I read your short story, “The Polish Rider,” too, and that one seems really to be messing with my understanding of what’s life and what’s story. And you have that Frieze article called “The Actual World,” and I want my stories to be thingly too, but at some point, I don’t know, I guess I just don't know what I’m supposed to be doing with this fiction-nonfiction-fiction-nonfiction, and what even is “actual”? Why don’t we paint up some swirling skies and climb right into them? That might be better, right? 

Self-Portrait with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, June 2020 (Oil on canvas, framed, 36 x 36 inches). Gift of the artist, Tate. Permanent collection. 

In this piece, I balance, attempt to sit on a metal plant stand. I lean against the peppercorn man, only he is much larger now. I clutch his arm. I am only a silhouette, though. Instead of personal features, my body is filled in with tiny copies of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The only colors in the palette are almond tones, latte foam, oatmeal. Gentle brushstrokes. The viewers quite admire this one. Such a comforting scene, isn’t it? They hover. Those books, interesting, right? Like they’re the core of this piece. And another speaks. Such calm. Such calm. If I pictured this painting until lunch, I could meditate myself into tranquility. 

Source Material Self-Portrait with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 

A week after my great uncle’s funeral, I sat on the porch with my grandfather at 6:03 am on clay-colored rocking chairs. He called the night before. 

“One of my eyes is gone,” he said. 

Medically, he had giant cell arteritis. In layman's terms, that means his veins were swelling. The eye doctor caught the diagnosis and told him that when the temporal vein swells too much, the eye gets no blood, and then the brain gets no sight. “It’s like plumbing,” the doctor said. “Sometimes, stuff doesn’t get through just right.” 

On the porch, we waited, which seemed the only thing to do, for my grandfather’s other eye to lose blood and his nerve endings to wither. My grandmother dialed numbers inside with the hope that maybe one office would answer the phone before they officially opened. 

As a gauge of lost sight, my grandfather and I focused on the pickup parked in the driveway across the street. Usually, this pickup and the boat beside it were eyesores. Usually, my grandparents shook their heads saying the junked-up driveway ruined the appeal of their knockouts and caladiums. This morning, the junk was a beacon. 

“I can see the tires,” he said. “Is it moving?”

It was not. 

What should’ve happened, according to the optometrist, was that my grandfather should’ve been checked into a hospital. The risk of heart attack and stroke heightens when veins swell. All the city’s hospital beds were full of virus patients, though. Being 85 was an underlying condition. Being on astronomical doses of cortisone, as was the treatment for giant cell arteritis, made my grandfather even more immunosuppressed. Thus, the hospital was out. 

“I’m watching myself,” he said, “go blind.” 

Another pickup drove by with a trailer attached, lawnmower bouncing over speed hump. “What was that?” he asked. 

“Another truck,” I answered. 

“How’s my grass?” 

“Like a golf course.”

“It’s still over there?” 

“Yes.” 

“The ratty one?” 

“Can’t you see the tires?” 

I’d like to tell you that I could foresee the future then, that I was planning ahead on that porch, making a list of things my grandfather would soon need: 

1. a watch that yells out the time every hour 

2. felt pads on the speed dial buttons 

3. handrails by the toilet 

4. floodlights in the living room (in case eyes come back) 

5. a radio 

6. a pie dish to be used as a plate so that he could push his food against the sides and scoop up into his mouth 

I will not tell this lie. I thought of none of those things. At the time, I had trouble thinking more than three minutes ahead of me. 

What I was mulling over, actually, was a book: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In it, the narrator has locked-in syndrome due to a car crash. He is paralyzed in a hospital bed and only able to blink one eyelid. After recently reading it, I’d asked my boyfriend a series of questions:

Would you rather lose your mind or your body? 

Would you rather lose an arm or a leg? 

Would you rather lose your ability to hear or your ability to see?

Together, we never agreed on an answer to the first question. The second: lose the leg, keep the arm. The third: lose the eyes, keep the hearing. His reasoning: you don’t want to lose your ability to communicate with other people. And music, there’s always music. My reasoning: I don’t think I’ve logged enough good sounds to keep me sane. On the porch, instead of planning, I returned to this exchange. I wondered if, somehow, we had caused my grandfather’s loss of sight, like our asking the question and choosing ears over eyes doomed him. Then, I remembered we are not gods or witches, just humans prone to retrospective interpretation. 

It was at this moment when my grandfather broke down. I wouldn’t say he cried so much as he crumpled. 

I left my rocking chair, pulled a metal plant holder next to him, and balanced on it, my cheek against his arm. 

“Let me see your face again,” he said. 

It was more than a shortbread situation, and I was angry at myself for not knowing what to say, angry for spending a life on literature when I could’ve been a doctor instead, angry at whoever wrote this moment of my life and of his because this moment, this one, was a repeat of when I was fourteen. It was the night I slept on my grandparents’ couch as my parents fought in the driveway outside. My grandfather sat up until morning, squished himself against me, said “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” This was a repeat, but flipped, my chance to return the “It’s okay.” And I said nothing. I watched him watch himself go blind, thinking, “No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t.” 

Poor peppercorn man.

Pardon, César Aira, yes, pardon. I’d like to discuss one of your stories. The one where the genie asks the main character if he’d rather have a Picasso or be Picasso. So, the character mulls it over, decides he wants a Picasso, and the painting appears. This guy, who has spent a whole story just thinking, thinking, thinking, finds himself with a Picasso painting in the middle of the Picasso Museum. “Thief,” we imagine the guards yelling at the end. Then, “Stop him.” 

       Thought for revision: What if your character never takes the genie seriously? This is prescriptive, I know, but maybe he should say something like this: “I want neither, genie. I can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, sir. And I have clearly dreamed you up. I am no fool and I want neither.” 

Exhibition Reviews: 

 “A lovely romp through a treasured artist’s oeuvre. Perfect for a leisurely stroll through the gallery before brunch. Yes, this is a croissant sort of show.” 

“Underwhelming? Your decision. Are three portraits worth $15.00 admission?”

“One wonders what actually happened that year. One wonders about her obsession with neutrals. One wonders about that tiny little man. If she were a documentarian instead, we would know who that man is for sure. What this exhibition does is make one wonder.” 

“Underwhelming in quantity? Yes, indeed. Furthermore, in this critic’s opinion, we must ask necessary questions: Is the literature serving her well in terms of content? Or does it prevent her from really seeing herself? Does it muddy her interpretation of experience? Perhaps a mirror would be more helpful than the pages of fiction.” 

“I take offense to the recent review about literature. Just because ‘this critic’ studied painting instead of novels doesn’t actually diminish the power of story to help us see. I do like the other guy’s comment about croissants though. I would add a cappuccino. I would add some cheese. And I would like ‘this critic’ to know that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a memoir.”

“A survivor’s tale? Or witness’s? We might ask the same to all of us who made it past 2020.” 

“Excuse me, it is this critic’s job to ask the necessary questions, dear. For the sake of art’s integrity and evolution.”

“Excuse me, but should it be?”

In my most productive fantasies, I am a long-dead painter. And one day, someone stumbles across a misfiled binder on a shelf. The binder is full of interviews with once-important people, lost conversations of an underfunded graduate-run journal. In my interview, I am asked three questions: 

1. How do you decide to represent yourself like this? 

2. These are from your life, right? 

3. What’s your goal with paintings? 

Question: How do you decide to represent yourself like this? 

Answer: Insecurity.

Question: These are from your life, right? 

Answer: I’d like to change my first answer from “insecurity” to “regret.” 

Question: What’s your goal with paintings? 

Answer: Revision. 

What I find interesting about self-portraits is that they weren’t common until the Renaissance, or so says page 164 of The Short Story of Art: A Pocket Guide to Key Movements, Works, Themes, & Techniques. I don’t know much about life before the Renaissance, but having a clear date for self-portraiture’s eruption pleases. Also, according to The Short Story of Art, various reasons to paint a self-portrait:

1. to draw attention to one’s self 

2. to act as a signature in a larger commissioned work

3. to be an “intimate reflection” 

4. to emphasize one’s skills 

5. to repeat the process over and over until one can express, or at least attempt to express, “the depression arising” from a dreadful existence (this one applying mostly to Munch). 

If you’ve never searched for Munch’s self-portraits, here’s an intro: Self-Portrait with Cigarette, Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu, Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm. In the short story of my art, self-portraits weren’t popular until well past the Renaissance. But I do understand Munch’s exercise in repetition.

In my most productive fantasies, I am a long-dead painter. Two months into my Tate Britain exhibition, people lose interest in my self-portraits. It seems that someone has taken the time to read my glass-housed scribbles. One in particular, “Notes to self #242,” intrigues all:

Train portrait, focus chin. Nostrils. Make them think you snatched the earbuds from that girl. Dispel belief you = watcher. Funeral portrait: Avoid full-on crying. Nobody knows how to act around that. Couple tears. All you get. Because you accept death with composure. Accept it! Porch portrait. Stick with neutrals beiges. Oatmeal=calm. Think latte. Think almond froth. Ignore Phil’s suggestion to lose the story references because what does Phil know anyway? He writes only movie reviews. He lives his life in constant story reference. And those book musings, at least, actually happened. Those book musings = true. True. True. Happened. 

Alright, team meeting on the matter of “happened.” Let’s convene in an hour. Teju, Ben, César, bring the wines. I’ll bring the munchies. 

Self-Portrait with Self-Story, July 2022 (Charcoal, unframed, 60 x 48 inches). Private collection.

In this piece, I am part me and part green corduroy chair. Behind me, the whole canvas, wool blanket with mauve and copper criss-crosses. Curtain blowing in front of my half-chair self, suggesting wind, suggesting tempest. I hold a paper titled “Self-Portraits and Conversation” and the number of slashes on it overwhelms. Violence. I am not alone in this piece. There are other half-chairs around me. And they’re saying to me, “Why don’t you cross out ‘neutrals’? Why don’t you underline ‘happened’? Why are you asking us all these questions like we’d ever answer back?”

Question: What’s your goal with paintings? 

Answer: Revision. No, wait. Delusion. My next self-portrait will be another alternate me, a pastiche inspired by a Meredith Frampton piece in my sister gallery, the Tate Modern: Portrait of a Young Woman. 1935. Wait, what was the question again? 

Self-Portrait as Frampton’s Portrait of a Young Woman, July 2022 (Pastel chalk pencil, unframed, 62.6 x 48.9 inches). Private collection. 

In this piece, I wear silk. My hair, in waves. In one vase: a single branch with waxy leaves. A scroll of paper held down by a bloom. A cello that I will learn to play. White shoes. I wear white pointed shoes with no worry about soiling them because I look like I’ve never left this tile-floored room, or like I’d never need to. My lord, the books on the right are balanced on a column. Where did I get that column? And what am I doing? Trying to garden, play, write, and read all at the same time in my formals? And that face. A bit judgy, maybe. That’s what the viewers will say. A bit prickly, sure, sure, but definitely not afraid though. They’ll ponder. I wonder how much regret she has. They’ll ponder. I wonder how close to the truth this is. They’ll question. Why isn’t she looking the viewer in the eye? They’ll ponder. I wonder what drives a person to re-see the self this way.