Here I am, dissolving into your my fucking testimony.
I’m not even trying to be present, am I? I hit the button, the doors slide shut, and instead of standing there like a regular citizen of the vertical transit system, I’m already half gone, vibrating at some frequency the fluorescent tubes can barely keep up with. That sickly yellow green aureole around my skull isn’t halo, it’s not enlightenment. It’s the exact color of institutional anxiety, the shade of every waiting room and government building and corporate non place that ever tried to convince me that I existed.
And that’s the hustle, right there in the title. “Solipsism.” The philosophy that only the self is real, that everything else might be dream or projection or elaborate fiction. Except here’s the joke: I can’t even keep MYSELF in focus. The one thing that’s supposed to be real, the supposedly solid “I” at the center of my private universe, and it’s smeared across the frame like something moving too fast to catch.
That blur isn’t technical failure. That’s ontological honesty. That’s what I actually look like in those in-between moments when nobody’s asking me to perform my personhood. I’m in an elevator in Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, where the bell cracked and the declaration was signed and none of it matters because I’m alone in a metal box and the only witness is my own iphone turning me into this chromatic ghost.
The scarf shirt just makes it worse. I got dressed this morning. I put on clothes. I went out into the world with the best of intentions, probably, and here I am: a smudge of consciousness trapped between floors, neither arriving nor departing, just BEING in that awful present tense that elevators enforce.
I chose to memorialize this. To frame my own dissolution and call it a self-portrait, which takes a particular kind of nerve or desperation or both. Most self-portraits are lies of clarity. They’re “here I am, solid, knowable, look at me.” But this? This is “here I am, maybe, sort of, in motion, leaving my own outline, unable to hold still long enough to be photographed because being photographed means being known and being known means being pinned down and being pinned down is death.”
So instead we get this apparition, this thing that Garcia Márquez knew about when he talked about giving birth to ourselves over and over.
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Except I’m not showing you birth. I’m showing you that moment between deaths, that instant when the old self hasn’t quite let go and the new one hasn’t quite arrived and there’s just this blur, this refusal to coalesce.
Philadelphia. Solipsism. In an elevator.