Self-seens are not selfies. A selfie may be incorporated into a self-seen, but a self-seen it is not.
Selfies are actual, are taken to show to others. Self-seens can exist only within the individual mind.
Self-seens can be what motivates people to act as they do, imagining themselves being seen. In a poem I once described a boy doing handstands in a park, 'acting within the theatre of himself.'
What got me to again thinking on this was, while on holiday, sitting at the top of a beach of black rocks and watching a young mother with her two children. She had brought cane-handled nets and was trying to get them interested in rock pool fishing. Neither the boy, the eldest, about four or five, nor the girl paid any attention to her scraping the nets through the shallow pools. The mother also had a dog barking at her to have its ball thrown. She irritably threw it. The boy wandered away picking over stones. The girl turned in a slow swaying circle singing to herself.
Wasn't difficult to read the mother's disappointment in the weary sag of her shoulders. This was not how she had self-seen her day on the beach. This should have been her in a 1930s train poster on the edge of a sandy cove, the children wide-eyed with excitement examining the nets, the dog sitting patiently by.
Watching her had me wondering how much of our lives are controlled by self-seens; and just who we are seeing ourselves as? Film scenes? How many unfit middle-aged men have run up a set of wide steps seeing themselves as Rocky? Not even whole films: how prey are self-seeers to advertising images? Bikini-sleek in an infinity pool; the blonde in the open-top car, hand languidly over the door, hair blowing in the wind; sashaying by as if on a catwalk...
This is our life in a time of self-seens. Even when [especially when?] there is no-one to see us. Pulling heroic faces in the bathroom mirror? I look too at the small dramas people invent for themselves. So very often these scenes could have been scripted [badly] by [copied from?] any one of a number of soaps.
On a jolly evening out find yourself being that moment the preoccupied one not smiling. The party person most occupied with his/her self-seen will be the one demanding to know why you are not 'happy'. You are spoiling their self-seen.
Politicians too, acutely self-aware, transparently play to the self-seen. One sees himself as Winston Churchill rallying the country against its enemies, another as Charles de Gaulle stubbornly saying, “Non.” Martin Luther King having a dream, Davy Crocket at the Alamo, a defiant Rosa Luxemburg, as cool as poster boy Che Guevara... All such self-seeers mortified when the image disintegrates and their delusion gets laughed at.
So do we arrive at actual selfies. They too lead to where characters can also be self-seeers. Here am I typically with friends at dinner, pushing a child's swing, lying among an advertiser's wild flowers... Self-seen.
© Sam Smith 25th June 2023
Selfies are actual, are taken to show to others. Self-seens can exist only within the individual mind.
Self-seens can be what motivates people to act as they do, imagining themselves being seen. In a poem I once described a boy doing handstands in a park, 'acting within the theatre of himself.'
What got me to again thinking on this was, while on holiday, sitting at the top of a beach of black rocks and watching a young mother with her two children. She had brought cane-handled nets and was trying to get them interested in rock pool fishing. Neither the boy, the eldest, about four or five, nor the girl paid any attention to her scraping the nets through the shallow pools. The mother also had a dog barking at her to have its ball thrown. She irritably threw it. The boy wandered away picking over stones. The girl turned in a slow swaying circle singing to herself.
Wasn't difficult to read the mother's disappointment in the weary sag of her shoulders. This was not how she had self-seen her day on the beach. This should have been her in a 1930s train poster on the edge of a sandy cove, the children wide-eyed with excitement examining the nets, the dog sitting patiently by.
Watching her had me wondering how much of our lives are controlled by self-seens; and just who we are seeing ourselves as? Film scenes? How many unfit middle-aged men have run up a set of wide steps seeing themselves as Rocky? Not even whole films: how prey are self-seeers to advertising images? Bikini-sleek in an infinity pool; the blonde in the open-top car, hand languidly over the door, hair blowing in the wind; sashaying by as if on a catwalk...
This is our life in a time of self-seens. Even when [especially when?] there is no-one to see us. Pulling heroic faces in the bathroom mirror? I look too at the small dramas people invent for themselves. So very often these scenes could have been scripted [badly] by [copied from?] any one of a number of soaps.
On a jolly evening out find yourself being that moment the preoccupied one not smiling. The party person most occupied with his/her self-seen will be the one demanding to know why you are not 'happy'. You are spoiling their self-seen.
Politicians too, acutely self-aware, transparently play to the self-seen. One sees himself as Winston Churchill rallying the country against its enemies, another as Charles de Gaulle stubbornly saying, “Non.” Martin Luther King having a dream, Davy Crocket at the Alamo, a defiant Rosa Luxemburg, as cool as poster boy Che Guevara... All such self-seeers mortified when the image disintegrates and their delusion gets laughed at.
So do we arrive at actual selfies. They too lead to where characters can also be self-seeers. Here am I typically with friends at dinner, pushing a child's swing, lying among an advertiser's wild flowers... Self-seen.
© Sam Smith 25th June 2023