Life or My Little Corner of It

In our Concepts of the Self class here at Champlain every first year student is required to create a self-portrait, along with, naturally enough, a final paper that explores the themes raised in the art.  As I've discussed here, and elsewhere, I'm a big believer in the project, and I always tell the students that they should create a new self-portrait every five years, even if they don't show it to anybody and just hide it away in the back of their closet.  I'm a big believer in modeling assignments, especially for first and second year students, so I create a new self-portrait every fall so that I can share the experience with them.  It's never too early or too late for self-reflection.  Self-portraits can be systematically planned, but sometimes they can be fairly organic.  This picture might make a good self-portrait, or at least the beginning of a discussion of a self-portrait, and it definitely represents the latter approach. I'm sitting at my desk writing this morning and turned to my left, and realized that this one little corner of my desk at home represented so much of what dominates my life at the moment, and, what is more key, what is important to me at this moment: one of my favorite pictures of my son (he's 3 or 4 and we'd just climbed to the top of Stone Mountain); a little globe turned appropriately towards Zanzibar; three of the seven volumes that comprise the Ramayana; and my open copy of one of my Proust volumes, captured mid-blog post, before I turned back to writing on the Ramayana.  That's not a bad little snapshot, literally and figuratively, on where I am right now, July 2017.  Now, I could have fudged it by sticking in a copy of the Quran, since I tend to devote a lot of time to Islam or issues related to Islam and the broader Islamic world, but I like the organic nature of this picture - and, well, I'm a historian and there's an integrity to artifacts that would have been contaminated by posing the picture.

Now, the one problem with this as a self-portrait is that it is pretty reactive and surface level in that it shows what is influencing me, and what I love or find interesting, which is not completely the same as saying who I am.  As I always point out to my students, we are much more than simply of our likes/dislikes and experiences.  Now, I would tie this all together in my supporting paper, naturally, but I should also find a way to express it visually.  However, that also moves us away from the notion of an organic piece of art.  Consequently, maybe this works better as the equivalent of one of those pictures that someone took of you unawares which really expresses your air than as a self-portrait.  This is clearly fodder for a class discussion in the fall.