PHOTOS OF ME, AND FASSBINDER

There aren’t that many photographs of me kicking around. I’m no ghost, but the pickings are slim. Author photos provide a useful chart of my aging between about 1997 and 2010, the period in which I was actively publishing, but now, aside from my scowling mug on a couple of bus benches (seriously?), I live mostly off-screen.

Last night, though, I was looking through pictures of a trip this summer to England with my daughter. We visited the Lake District, the Cotswolds, Devon and Cornwall. All of the locales are splendidly captured, bathed in a rare, endless sunshine; the results feel true to my experience (which was brilliant!). But in the couple dozen candids of me that my daughter shot, I just don’t recognize myself.

I do (begrudgingly) accept that it must be me. I recognize the dour way I set my lips, as if to mirror the flat Atlantic horizon (when I really should have been grinning). That’s a familiar pose for me. Also the slightly pained squint, as if I’m intensely aware of that sad disconnect between what I feel and what I actually express to the world. But despite knowing it must be me (surely no one else brought that lime shirt to Windermere), I have become a stranger to myself.

I worked my socks off in that picture-less time; I made a solid career (and set another mostly aside) raised kids, paid down mortgages. Tried my level best. But at some point I drifted into unpredictable seas unfathomably wide, and a decidedly weird sales job beyond the reach of amateur cameras.

I suspect most of us feel the same way when we look back over a period of years indistinguishable one from another, at least work-wise. We wonder what has become of us, and sometimes examining the photographic record doesn’t offer much of a clue.

A few months ago, I found myself living alone toward the northern extreme of a dead-end downtown street. The address itself, next to the shelter, and with abundant litter blowing around ominously, like tumbleweed, felt freighted with symbolism. I stood many evenings at the front window and watched other people arrive at their own windows and look out at the same street, each of us an unpaid extra in a Fassbinder film. More than a few times we spied each other, I know we did, and pretended we hadn’t.

Some of this sensation of being utterly divorced from the guy I see in those photos, walking the Cornish coast or clambering Coniston’s awesome fells, is simply that I am a bigger man now, and thicker. It is a mild shock to realize I don’t feel the way I must look to others. Gravity has had its way. That unsettles me. It feels irreversible and is mildly depressing. I wish I could claim that some Instagram filter had been applied, something that might, with a slight twist of the dial, add cat whiskers or, ratcheted in the other direction, might restore a more lithe profile, make me once again decent with a tennis racquet.

I’m not sure this all boils down to simple vanity (though I understand it sure sounds that way). My being alone the last few months has made for all sorts of introspection, and boatloads of handwringing, but insight has come my way too, albeit weakly, like October sun puffing through dawn fog.

Photographs annotate the present as much as they do the past. They are signposts along the road we’ve travelled, but they also map where we live now. When they are absent, memory’s sketch artist will immediately get to work making its own pictures, so we don’t wind up completely lost. The brain likes nothing more than to invent connective tissue. Both good fiction and true biography work because of spaces left deliberately in the action. They give us work to do; they require us to invest in the art. And as I attempt now to fill the gaps, to decide what sort of life I’ve had, what sort of father I’ve been, whether I’ve left a positive or negative impression, I will have to decide also whether I trust my memory not to lie to me.

So, what does it mean in the end, this 5-volt jolt when I see a shot of myself hunting fossils along a stone beach south of Weymouth, the square-ish slab of me hunched over the Jurassic? At the end of the day, I think it might not be that I don’t recognize myself in those snapshots. Rather, it is that I recognize myself too well, and wish I didn’t. I would prefer a little mystery to this so-dull truth, which is that I am precisely the same as everyone else: I am getting older.

*

One of those bus benches I mentioned has been edited. The photo of me has had an elaborate spiral moustache added, and a braided beard, caterpillar eyebrows and a too-small graffiti crown. Dali as imagined by Basquiat. I like it very much and if I knew the artist I’d plead with them to go again with more images. “Please,” I’d say, “show me who I really am.”