Self-Portraits

Issue 227

Self-Portrait, Rome 2016

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How innocent the past looks from my cocky perch in the present, now that I have knowledge about what’s to come, now that I’m aware of where the story leads. Yet I still can’t remember, however much I strain, the feeling in the old pictures that I hold in my hands, taken long before this life took its present shape.

I am the young boy in formal clothes, a sly, knowing smile on my face, my hair curly and long, the photograph faded and worn. I look upward, peering right into the lens, the photographer clearly an adult. I look brash, headstrong, and I’m just about to speak. But I am also the slightly older boy with the slightly longer hair that’s on a beach in another photograph, mid-laugh, mid-air, an expansive sky behind me. Still boastful, feisty, my arms raised, my glare directed once again at the lens. And I am the young man in a suit in a different photograph, the dark city behind me, my head turned away, another sly, knowing smile on my face, on a night that comes so many years later but that looks so much the same.

In this very moment, the surprises of life appear inevitable, easily explainable, almost deterministic, with each one a spark for what happens next. I can see the trajectory, how the sly look on the face of the boy transforms into the sly look on the face of the man. It suggests order, design, a story foretold, without any potential for sideroads. But I know that’s obviously wrong, that this journey was haphazard, confused, disjointed, full of backtracks and sidetracks and that it only looks direct because, when I turn around today, all the footprints lead to the spot where I stand. Yet I still prefer to overlook that truth, to see, instead, all my past decisions as coherent and purposeful. In this very moment, I feel grand, wised-up, hip to the world, savvy about all the events that, long ago, seemed so mysterious.

The photograph that I hold in my hand shows a young man with a large smile on a clear and cloudless day. He looks right at the camera, an arm around his sister, and he knows everything that will happen in the years to come. He’s certain, relentless, perhaps insufferable, captured by the clarity of vision that’s both the virtue and vice of youth. He has a mission that’s a bit reckless, along with a boldness that’s a bit foolhardy, but it couldn’t have been otherwise.

Nearly all of the early photographs in my hands have a common background. I recognize the northeast, with its tall, deciduous trees, with its cloud-covered skies, with the parks and playgrounds and backyards of my childhood. But the landscapes in the later photographs begin to change. I see the same person, the same smile, looking right at me, on an empty street in Paris, at a restaurant in Bucharest, just outside of São Paulo. I see the salty air on my lips in Palermo, the winds blowing my hair along a Greek shore, the unforgiving sun on my skin in Marrakesh. Yet these later photographs eventually start to blend—they start to feel almost interchangeable—with backgrounds that seem less important than the figure that stands before the camera.

I wonder, today, whether all the roads leading to this moment were necessary. It is an outrageous question, one for a stormy night and long hours of contemplation. To change the past, to alter one decision here or shade one decision there, would cause more than ripples. Had I spoken kinder. Had I not made that choice. Had I said what I thought. In a life, these aren’t ripples. Even the most incidental of decisions, the most incidental of moments captured by a photograph, redounds onto the man who writes these words today, yes, although my mind can’t help but doubt. I am beginning to wonder whether all roads lead to the same destination, whether every road really does lead to Rome, despite the urgency, and expansiveness, that I felt in every moment.

Because all of the photographs do contain that knowing smile. I can track this feature—playful, mischievous, far too clever—from the earliest poses. Why so devious? Why so sure? From the very beginning? Regardless of the year, regardless of the place, it is the one ineffable, intrinsic feature that I spot each time, even though it does, just a little, seem to diminish. As the years pass there are more pictures where I look away. More pictures from behind. From the side. That knowing smile, somehow, appears to know less as the years pass.

Tomorrow, I claim, it won’t happen again. I won’t be startled by the photographs that are taken today, because I know, now, what’s to come. I am wiser, surely, the path is clearer. The photograph that is snapped today won’t look innocent, vulnerable, unaware of how years come with convulsions, is what I absolutely must claim.