On Representations of Ourselves, or "The New Profile Pic," or Myths of Self-Imitation...

A discussion on the self-referentiality of imitation of the self...Oh, ok, I'll stop being so veiled, in my travels through the blogosphere today I saw a comment by someone that said that all the bloggers they met were nothing in real life like they portrayed themselves in their blogs. Which got me thinking...


On Representations of Ourselves, or "The New Profile Pic," or Myths of Self-Imitation...

"...many people put on masks to discover who they are under the covert masks they usually wear, so that the overt mask reveals rather than conceals the truth, reveals the self beneath the self; and it tells us that, although such masquerades cannot change people into other people, they may change them into others among their many selves"....Doniger goes on to say, "the essence of a masquerade: to present something known in such a way that people mistake it for something unknown (or the reverse.)"

Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (Oxford, 2005), p.3-5.

Now, hmnnn... My new profile photo doesn't look like me. I'm not sure who it looks like... it was darkened considerably for the profile. Here is the original photo (click on it for a larger size), and another of the painterly things I did to the background with the impressionist brush and with the midtones darkened. Neither look like me, the light washing away the wrinkles, the years, the spots and arrows of outrageous time, but I found it an interesting photo in itself, not as representation of me as I see myself, but as representation of an image of self that is just plain different. I'm a soft woman, not the way it looks in the small version, which I think of as inclining towards heavy metal... *chuckles*~

If you met me, though, I might have to impersonate the image of myself that I have created in my blog... ! Oh, it's so interesting, persona, representation, who we are, the ways we present ourselves to each other! And how we might need to masquerade as ourselves were we to meet. Or, another approach, perhaps we masquerade as an aspect of ourselves that helps us to discover who we, in fact, are. So I masquerade as a writer in my blog, only to discover that I am a writer! The mask and the central persona become interchangeable so that life imitates art...

And he said, "You are nothing like the woman you are in your blog. In your writing you present a completely different person.' Which shocked me. Who says I have to be like the woman I portray in my blog anyway? I never said it was the 'real' me any more than any of the other 'me's' are real. *giggles & giggles*

I might not be at all as you imagine me to be were we to meet. And vice versa. Isn't this scary to contemplate? That the mask of the narrator of the blog and the central persona of the person might be far apart rather than simply interchangeable. Makes you wanna fret, doesn't it.

Especially if we are trying to discover a writerly voice, our best one, in our bloggerly lifewriting.

How does reality intersect with illusion anyway?