Like many authors, I’ve been fortunate enough to occasionally enjoy the highly-valued assistance of friends, family members, readers, and colleagues who provide needed feedback on different aspects of my writerly existence. Some at times have even gone far beyond providing feedback to actually posting online, or presenting offline, blurbs and recommendations that help not only to promote my work but also to define it. A current case in point is what one bibliophile-friendly techno-princess has called my real-time photo make-over: as in the image seen here along with several others designed to update my “digital PR profile,” featuring the photo by RS Special (whose request not to use their full name I hereby honor).
Being a writer, I dive headlong nearly every day into a torrential flow of words sparkling with possibilities and I work to extract from that flow different sounds, imagery, ideas, and entire compositions capable of offering relevant reflections of the world both inside and outside my own head. Such a daily exercise in disciplined creative passion tends to focus my thoughts more on striking a balance between the unyielding clarity of prose and the seductive allusiveness of poetry than on the demands of managing a public image. I recognize the necessity of doing so in our 21st century techno-blitzed world but it simply is not my forte. Which is I why I am totally sincere when expressing gratitude to long-time colleagues who adopt my PR-challenged cause for a day or two and make a useful contribution to something––call it literacy–– that goes beyond me as an individual.
Because I give myself so wholly to the furious embrace of words on a regular basis, I rarely classify myself as one kind of writer or another. It is usually editors or readers who make for me the distinction of when I am more present in the world, or on the page, as an essayist, or fiction-writer, or some kind of fever-driven scribbler. Obviously, I know the difference between various literary forms but it’s not unusual for one genre during a heated word-session to flow at will into another–– much the way a dancing couple or individual might keep boogying from one song to the next. It is also often a writer or reader who will decide which of the subjects I address––whether politics, spirituality, literature, sexuality, relationships, history, etc.–– best suits me for them as a writer. I know me as a self-contained multiverse but realize most humans prefer the more simplistic label of a single category.
And so I’m often intrigued to discover which of my literary aspects, or perhaps personas might be a more interesting word, stand out the most in the mind of another. One of the main reasons I like the particular image seen here––though yes, I do like the entire series–– is because it does block the flow of words through my life into some of the different literary forms that have accumulated around me: poet, fiction-writer, editor, journalist, and historian. I appreciate the central photo because the gray glittering in the beard stands as evidence that the painted words have not simply been attached to the image to make colorful unwarranted claims. They are there because over a period of years of diving in and out of the torrential flow of possibilities, they have, thankfully, now been earned.
by Aberjhani
© 18 August, 2010
