a kind of kinship
It’s around six PM on a Friday. I know this because I went to the library following my after-school dance class, and have since been kicked out of the building. Not because I was throwing a rager, or anything. It’s closing time. I am sat on a bench by the Remembrance memorial, waiting for mum to pick me up on her way back from work. The fingers of my right hand are wedged in my book: my thumb on the last page of John Shade’s poem Pale Fire, my index marking the corresponding footnotes from his editor Charles Kinbote, and the rest of my hand pushing the rest of the book away from me, to save for later. I bought the book second-hand after seeing it in Abigail Thorn’s essay on art (which is still a comfort watch). Her book recommendations haven’t let me down so far.
I clumsily transfer the text to my left hand, which has been tucked in my jacket until now. It’s November. I pick a biro from my breast pocket, uncap it and position my hand over the paper. My pen marks the page. It’s a habit I have picked up from Bookstagram, perhaps in an effort to make myself seem more studious. I never could draw straight (or do anything straight, for that matter - maybe that’s a subject for a different day). The wobbly ballpoint highlights this line:
The urge to edit oneself is strong. I felt a kind of kinship with this Kinbote man. His whole task is to interpret and edit the words of another, and here he is, so absorbed in chasing the best word choice that he loses focus of Shade’s poem completely.
Losing focus of the poem is kind of the whole point of Pale Fire. Shade and Kinbote are entirely fictional, the imaginings of Vladimir Nabokov. Kinbote’s commentary only succeeds in telling us more about himself, and the circumstances surrounding the death of Shade, rather than the poem.
This parenthesised peek into Kinbote’s mind came back to me yesterday, as I read this quote from the new Now That’s a Thought post.1
“Even though sometimes I feel very strongly about what I am saying; it is so tempting to pepper my sentences with ‘sometimes’ and ‘perhaps’… Maybe we should all be more thick-skinned. (There I am hedging again in my uncertainty).”
— from I need everyone to like me
did you break your nose?
I find the concept of self image fascinating. There is no way in the world that we can ever know what we look like all the time, unless we post ourselves in front of a mirror and do not move. Even then, there are parts we cannot see.
One of the things my degree has taught me is that there is a difference between vision and perception. We cannot help but perceive ourselves. When we look at ourselves we see constituent parts, our thoughts and feelings on certain areas of our body and face, things people have said to us about ourselves that have affected these thoughts. The experience of watching people’s eyes flick down to a badly concealed patch of acne on my chin, and back up to meet mine, or the memory of my cousin asking me if I had broken my nose (she was young, but I was only slightly older. I had not, in fact, broken my nose). These blink back at me in the mirror, no matter how different I look now.
Self image does not only extend to our physical looks, however. I prefer to view it as a collection of traits and beliefs we have about ourselves. The traits can be cemented through role-assignment in friend groups. Okay, who’s the smart friend? As Lucy Dacus said,
“I don't wanna be funny anymore/
I got a too-short skirt, maybe I can be the cute one”— from I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore
liked your message
On the topic of role assignment and beliefs about ourselves, perhaps what I should really be talking about is social media. The big SM. Something that it seems impossible to avoid when reading an article on substack — everybody take a shot! — and I apologise for adding to the ever-growing creature of vaguely social media-related pieces.
BeReal is an interesting addition to this conversation. In the app’s early days, people would withhold their posts if they knew they had something more interesting going on later in the day. Now that there is incentive for posting on time, it certainly seems like a less curated platform. I still find myself unwilling to engage fully. I am an avid BeFaker. I show a lot of the ceiling, and I still do the good-old fashioned technique of waiting till I have something on. The random schedule of BeReal almost necessitates a constant presence of your phone, the ringer being on, and the ability to drop everything for a minute or two to broadcast your location/ current activity. It’s slightly creepy, as much as it is a sweet concept. But maybe the reason why I find it slightly creepy is the reduced ability to edit the outcome of a BeReal, other than withholding until a later time, or just covering the back and front lenses.
Every time that I post on social media, as I semi-often do on Instagram, it is edited, though not in the traditional sense. At the risk of overusing the word, I curate my online presence. Instagram is just as artificial, if not more so, than it was in the days of themed grids and using the Rio De Janeiro filter unironically. But now, people ache to be messy. The resurgence of digital cameras, y2k style, the pushback against the clean girl aesthetic, it’s seemingly a trend to be a bit rough around the edges. Gone are the glass and white paint days of perfect boredom, now it strikes me that people are trying too hard to be real. And I get the appeal, I do: it’s deceptively comforting. However, this portrayal of things that are supposedly ‘close to reality’ does not mean that the posts we see haven’t been meticulously crafted. I pay attention to what I put up, and every time I do, every time someone new follows me, I begin to wonder how they view me. Where do they start on my Instagram? How far do they scroll through my photo carousels? What impression does it give of me? There are times where I ache to delete myself from the site altogether.2
I thought perhaps that substack would be different, and it is, in a way. I get the sense of shouting into the void. But the craft of writing in any way brings with it the task of editing. I go back and take out the ‘I’ statements and wonder how self-centered they make me look. I reword my grammatical errors, delete my craven ‘perhaps’-es. I am using this site as a journal for the summer, but this does not take away the fact that, fundamentally, it is a site where some pay attention to every minute statistic, come to game the system, to gain financially.3
Maybe the urge to edit ourselves is inherently quite a sweet one. We work like museum curators (note: is there any other word than ‘curate’ that I can use above?). We take care, tend to ourselves as if we are watering a plant or renovating a painting. The constant wondering what people think about it, the hiding of areas of ourselves to manipulate our outward image, though? I’m tired of it.
The creation of my own image is something I am working to deconstruct (see also: my previous post on this in a more narrative style). I haven’t quite got there yet, but I don’t know if anyone ever does. Isn’t it inherent to normative social influence that we want to be accepted into a social group, to present ourselves to be liked? They say that the pain of social exclusion is somewhat comparable to physical pain (my agreement with this statement is both variable and more of a matter for my degree essays), so why wouldn’t we take the steps we can to avoid this hurt?
facile and revolting
A bit of self-editing is key. I only want to take the steps to make this process less linked to material things. What are some ways to do this without having to spend money on new clothes, or makeup, or a subscription to a vitamin MLM? This is why I’m writing this, to give myself the space to edit and present a finished product, without having to post on Instagram. In a brain which urges to have control and make and remake my outward appearance, the best thing I can do is spill my thoughts on to my laptop keyboard every day, rather than putting something on my story.
Kinbote often alludes to the drafts of Pale Fire which he has uncovered that went unpublished by Shade in favour of later revisions. The commentary brings them up again and again, with eventually raw frustration at the discarding of what Kinbote views as the true poem for its later “facile and revolting” drafts. Charles Kinbote lives in the heads of everyone who has ever attempted to write, and he’s been with me since before that Friday evening. He is the impulsive force that tells you a whole reworking of a section is incorrect, you should have published the first draft, you’re paying too much attention, or not enough. Is this why third and fourth and fifth drafts get so tiring? There isn’t an end in sight because ‘The Finish’ is an entirely abstract thing which we dictate ourselves. If only our preferences could shift slightly, so that we might be more satisfied with the end result, that we wouldn’t worry that certain words are incorrectly hyphenated, or repeated too much, or repeated too much. What matters is the flow of the work, not the concision and polishing.
I don’t believe that. Editing is important. But not to the point where it consumes us fully. It is easy to lose ourselves in the feeling that nothing will ever be perfect, and diminish our own self image in the process. I think that we should distinguish between these two things, as much as we can: nothing will ever be perfect, and perhaps that is okay.
[day 6 of a summer of substack]
This one was interesting to write. As I said before, writing about writing is very intriguing to me, but ironically this one could do with more concision. I had a lot of thoughts! Also, I think I accidentally overlapped with all of the posts I’ve put out in the last week — so how’s that for thematic curation?