This is my all-time favorite picture of me. Not me, really, of course…but this greeting card is evocative enough of a pivotal meaning for me; I’ve kept track of it for over ten years. It is the haircut I had as a five year old. I’ve learned to respect the idea that I’m very likely researching what I cared about as a five year old. My commitments and interests begin that far back, I’m sure; I posit they do for most of us. Certainly psychoanalytic theory posits this--Madeleine Grumet, Deborah Britzman, Alice Pitt, Anne Phelan among others, propose that teaching and teachers can benefit from psychoanalytic ideas-- that they cannot escape them, in fact. “Impossible Profession” says Britzman of psychoanalysis but also of education. The metaphor here? We try to see who we are. But such work is a kind of koan--the "answer" is as much in the effort as in the vision. Just look at the picture’s environment—an intimate place of industrial design meant to catch our waste and let us then sanitize and clean, get a dirty job (one surrounded by all kinds of taboos and rituals) done, check ourselves in the mirror and go back into “the world.” But what if this is the world, or, at least a world?
Our subject's view is chancy--scaling multiple barriers. This gaze was not designed for her but she’s claiming it anyway she can. Improvising. Can she make it? I am amused to see that I inadvertently cut off the bottom of the picture which shows a pile of dirty towels beneath the child. (A strategy that failed? The leftovers of others’ mess? The intermediary step?) Lastly: The reach of one cloth from the sideline is salient. Is this a help? A random draping left from cleaning up? The ambiguity of it is poignant, I think. Perhaps it’s both! Perhaps it’s neither. That cloth is "X" edging in from the margin and that feels freeing—like there is a way out, an after to this moment.
The views are multiple: my picture of this picture is a view, as well. The frame of my office window holds up the card and the window holding the weather outside--interpreting, enhancing, disturbing and rendering (as art?) one moment in one day of one year of one life….like a snapshot, but better: a snapshot of a snapshot bridging times and places and, after all is said and done, ideas. I like how this bad photo fades into the page in the upper right corner when place on a blank white page. Where are the edges?
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