We have entered that calamitous age when our oldest has a cell phone. Not just any old dumb phone – a smartphone. It was a decision that was weighed and reweighed, then I grabbed some sand out of the decision and let it slip through my fingers while I stroked my scruff. And wouldn’t you know it, the whole time I was actually expecting to be able to grasp that golden statue without the giant rock tumbling down like Indiana Jones?
After just three short weeks we have had to cut back the palm skin that was growing around the phone edges. There was some texting of incoherent onomatopoeias, fabricated acronyms, and times when I couldn’t get his eyes unglued from 18 square inches of glass that occupied his central vision. But none of that is why I took it away. It was the camera.
As it turns out it was incapable of backing up data because of insufficient memory. This is because the gallery was almost completely filled with pictures of himself. Here he is smiling, in this one he is reflected in his sunglasses, now he is on top of the roof, there he is recording his own back flip. The kid circumnavigated himself thrice over and had the pics to prove it.
So we talked. He was given a box, and he could put anything he wanted in that box. He could have filled it up with sunsets and siblings, friends, flowers, bumbling bees or parental cameos, but instead it was populated with himself. Endless options of variety, and he chose himself in all of them. If someone had a photobook and in it was nothing but pictures of grasshoppers, you would rightly presume they have an odd obsession, and wonder maybe if they could benefit from rounding out their interests. Maybe spill the bounds of entomology, snap a pic or two of a chipmunk, just for funsies?
Now, I don’t want to be too hard on the kid. I mean, just because someone fills their memory with pictures other than themselves can mean they simply have the self awareness of how odd it looks, but hoard self-importance in some other poorly lit corner of life. It’s his first phone, and there is some novelty of being able to capture the banal moments of life in perpetuity.
Here is the fatherly wisdom I brought out, but make sure you keep reading below to see my opportunity to eat crow.
I get nauseated when I spend too much time with my own face. It’s because I cannot place myself. What causes me, when I am shown a group picture, to rapidly scour the image for myself, like a tiny game of Where’s Waldo? Do I not know what I look like? Or maybe through images of me I become an objective observer, along with other observers, of a strange human and can inspect myself in the disembodied 2nd and 3rd person point of view? I can see myself through the eyes of others, from the same distance and in the same light. Anyway, what criteria do I apply to myself to know when I have found myself? Am I person, place or thing? A pile of adjectives? A pile of desires? What are my ingredients and nutrition facts? Am I shelved in the Non-fiction, or Fiction section of the library?
There is something of tree gum about the self – you can chew until your jaw aches and all the effort is just a reshaping the same lump which lost its taste a while ago.
You get to a certain point in life and you will beg, borrow and steal for an opportunity to not think about yourself for two seconds. The conclusion I have reached is that I will find no answers to the questions of me by looking at me. If it didn’t work after the first thousand images, I have little hope another couple of terabytes unveil any new findings. The last thing I want is more of me – the enigmatic, undiscoverable, elusive, frustrating, intransigent, mortal self. And the only remedy I have found in this wide world that can apply such a divine salve is beauty.
Beauty is that one thing that can save me from endless navel gazing. And if beauty can take me from myself to a higher, fresher, cleaner place even for two seconds, that means if I take twenty pictures of beautiful things, that is forty seconds of forgetfulness. That’s like a vacation. So my counsel was not scolding, but a pleading to fill his life with beauty.
As a counterpoint one may say, “Well, maybe he does find himself beautiful and that is why there are so many pictures of him, did you ever think of that? Huh?”
Yes, I did think of that, which is why I put the question in the refutatio, oh invisible adversary.
My answer is that that certainly can be true – we bear the image of God and that is a beautiful image. Specifically what makes it beautiful is that it carries the mind and heart away from the self back to God – which I believe is one of the chief assets of beauty – it takes our eyes off of ourselves and back to God. Something in it triggers the chase instinct. If that is true, then there is a conflict of interest in trying to get away from myself by ogling images of the thing I’m trying to get away from.
After the conversation, which ended with our usual Leave It To Beaver resolution, I had a spot of conviction in the soul. What if my children went through my camera gallery on my phone, what would they find? I will tell you. Pictures of receipts, bar codes for the inevitable malfunction of the scanners at Lowes check out, three of me holding different women’s shoes at Goodwill (they were too wide), a chicken, and a couple dozen accidental screenshots of random websites. I have filled my box with as little beauty as he.
How would it be, then, if they saw it filled with blushing sunsets, or a blushing wife, or a sky grumbling with storms, or cameos of bees ass-up in a daisy? Would they see a man obsessed with beauty, who had been bewitched? Someone who had found the treasure map and was in hot pursuit? Or a father in the doldrums – practical, stringent, sensible, and as excitable as tortoise who has popped a few quaaludes?
Thought Butter 