Self Portrait -- #32

His uneven beard, dark black (which seems strange considering his brown hair that gets so bleached and brown-blond in the tropics) and thick growth on the cheeks, white at the chin (he will be 50 in 13 days), appears uneven—like fields and crops ravaged by drought, up near where he wishes he had thick sideburns(like Elvis, like his dad, even)—instead just wisps of whisker and spaces of smooth skin leave a gap of an inch or so up to the hairline at the top of the ear. (He has said that if he had full sideburns his high school acting career, in fact, his life would have gone another completely different direction).

 

Idiot.

 

It’s just another symptom of his Dostoyevsky period, as he calls it.

 

Oh, and as he paints these words, he battles ennui, of course, and melancholy and his own peculiar inner struggle with demons, old and new. He wonders if there is another way to say this, then gives up. Yet he proclaims some kind of satisfaction using a double negative, thus disavowing the need for happiness.

 

He wants to cherish his individuality and unique depressions--like a romantic poser. It’s always the same feeling, for what else can it be? He doesn’t analyze it too deeply, or care to, because his mind is too eclectic and super-charged, hungry for more knowledge and insight, this acts  as a counter to his ennui—you lovely dark lady, you.

 

He looks at the notes in his yellow legal pad and realizes that what he types here is all out of order, muddled, transformed, transmogrified from his original conception. Fucking Dada, when he wants to paint the Mona Lisa. The work will probably go through many incarnations until it is unrecognizable from this very script you are reading. So what he writes now may not be what you read—that feeling is there again, just off in the corner, fuck off Emily, no wait, I love you—and Dostoyevsky save a chair for me. but you know, I must say, "I find happiness with Emily over there behind the cupboard."

 

Music plays on the stereo (he still calls such things stereos); the Kenwood sound system that he and his wife bought three or four years ago over the Christmas season. Bach is conducive to writing. The cello suites, Pablo Casals, and yet he would play Landslide by the Dixie Chicks, over and over again—until it became a joke—he even heard it on David Letterman afterwards, applied to the President. It seemed like poetry, at the time, something from Wallace Stevens. He was moved by the thought of aging, death, time, aren’t we all? Sometimes the simple is most correct; Ockham’s edginess and perspicuity, says it all. He didn’t try to figure it all out. He just let himself go in the flood of tears and emotions. It was so different to him, crying like that.

 

The air in the room is chilly, he likes that, he says he came to Sapporo to be close to Russia and to live in the cold weather and to enter his Dostoyevsky period, he would read Russian writers here, in this very room, where he is now writing. His introduction to Dostoyevsky was through “The Master of Petersburg” by J.M. Coetzee, the South African writer. Fantastic book, he loved everything about it and fell in love. Demon possession, my ass.

 

He lived in South Africa for six years—from 1980, arriving the very day of John Lennon’s assassination, so how could he ever forget? Now you understand. He stayed until October 1986. You won’t see any of this in the self portrait that he paints right now. It’ll all be way under the last coat—deep down, layered, deep…almost inside the canvas.