The Scottish poet Robert Burns famously petitioned the gods to give us this gift. If only we could see ourselves as others see us we might escape from many of those self-deceptions for which the human race is notorious, and which are responsible for so much of our unhappiness. In a small measure, today, I might have been granted an answer to his prayer.
I believe that, shortly before my departure on holiday, I might have mentioned on this blog that I was approached by a student of information technology at the University of Bradford, with the request that she be allowed to make a brief documentary film about my work. It was a curious experience, and I have been wondering what the result might be. Today my question was answered as she sent me a copy of her film. I was impressed, on the whole, by the technical expertise involved, and by the fact that there had been some obvious thought in relation to the linking of visual elements and the interview material. Nevertheless, watching the film was an odd experience.
Although I have seen photographs of myself before, and during my university teaching career I did appear in the occasional brief press interview, this was a very different enterprise. Despite my clear recognition of the occasion when the film was made it came across me, in this version, as curiously unfamiliar, not particularly because of what I said but because of the sight of myself talking to others, as if a stranger observed. Who is this person? How strange that he appears to share with me so many views about the world! Or, is that what I really think?
The arrival of the film was timed with a remarkable aptness. One of the things I attempted during my recent holiday was a self-portrait. I think that I might have tried this exercise on two occasions in the past: the first while I was a student and the second as part of a collective exercise involving members of the Unit 9 group, to which I belong. (We all agreed to do “selfies”, but not the conventional photographic ones.) On this third occasion I am not sure what it was that set me going….apart from the availability of copious free time during our cruise. I rigged up two mirrors in the cabin bathroom so that I could see myself in the correctly objective orientation (“as others see us”) and drew in pencil. In many respects it is a reasonable likeness, although I can detect slight shifts in the scale and orientation as I moved my attention from one part of the head to another. When I had finished, however, despite the likeness, it did feel as if I was observing a stranger.
The interesting thing about the juxtaposition of these two images (film and sketch) however, is that they reveal very different kinds of person. The film depicts somebody who is chatty and lively and rather extroverted. The sketch is of a person who is pensive and introverted. Admittedly, the first is a record of a “performance”: is this also true of the second? Do either of them satisfy Robert Burns’ prayer?