Know Thy Selfie
Greetings colleagues, families, friends and, above all, you, the Class of 2014. I want to begin by congratulating you on a job well done. Bravo! Not only have you managed to graduate—an accomplishment in and of itself—but you’ve managed to do so with great integrity, success, and aplomb.
First of all, you’re the largest class College Prep has ever graduated—ninety-nine of you, to be precise. Your presence has dominated the school ever since you arrived. But you’re not only the largest class; you’ve excelled in many more ways than sheer number alone. For example, you’ve broken school records in several sports and under your leadership have won league and even national championships. The same is true in debate, and you’ve won impressive awards as well in many academic disciplines, raised money for the Maru-a-Pula School, put on amazing performances and exhibitions, volunteered your time for numerous causes—all of this a testament to your prodigious talents, abilities, and hard work. You should be very proud of yourselves, as everyone here today is proud of you.
But praise and recognition have their dangers as well. It’s easy, all too easy, to get attached to accomplishments, awards, prizes, prestige. To identify with these accomplishments to the point where you’re living for them rather than acquiring them in the process of living. Far too easy to spend all your time trying to live up to an impossible image.
The image. The word derives from the Latin “imago” meaning “copy,” “imitation” or “shadow.” That is to say, the image isn’t real; it’s false, a reproduction. The word “imago” has other associations in Latin literature as well. It can mean a “shadow” or a “ghost.” The Roman poet Propertius writes in one of his elegies that he will become, after his death, the imago of his beloved, Cynthia:
illic quidquid ero, semper tua dicar imago:
Whatever I will be there [in the afterworld], I will always be called your ghost
What the line implies is that the “imago,” the image, is not merely a passive reflection—a static picture—but a kind of spirit that has a power and life of its own. Like a ghost, the “imago” can haunt or possess its owner. In other words, the relationship can become inverted so the owner lives in service to her or his own image rather than the reverse.
Today, we’re living in a time where images are arguably even more powerful than in ancient Rome, a time when more and more of our lives revolve around images. Take, for example, your yearbook pages. For better or for worse, they consist mainly of pictures with very few, if any, words, whereas thirty years ago, yearbooks usually had just one picture and several quotations. Then there’s Facebook, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with books, but everything to do with faces. And sites like Tumblr and Instagram, which have even fewer words and are even more about the image.
At the center of all these sites lies, arguably, the image of the self. The self-image, or selfie (a term I learned from you all just a few years back), is often the best of many shots, taken at just the right angle, in just the right light. My new phone even has an option called “Beauty Shot” that automatically airbrushes away any flaws, blemishes or shadows. In other words, the selfie may look natural but it’s far from it.
It’s understandable at a school like this, in an age like this, to want others to see us at our best, in just the perfect lighting, at just the right angle. Here I’m talking about a slightly different, but related, kind of image, “image” in the sense that politicians and celebrities use the word, like when they want to “build” their image, “improve” it, “fix” it or do an “image re-haul.” This is the kind of image I’ve been worried about ever since Mollie and Joseph asked me to be your graduation speaker. I’ll confess that my first thought when they asked me wasn’t about what I’d say but rather about how I’d appear. What if my speech wasn’t coherent or, maybe even worse, what if I had a giant piece of spinach caught between my teeth?
These are the fears of the ego talking, that part of us that wants to project a cool, flawless exterior, the image of someone who never stumbles, falters, who always knows the right thing to say. I’m not going to lie to you and say I don’t care about my image (after all, I did start by showing off my Latin)—I do care. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. It motivated me, after all, to work hard on this speech.
But there’s a freedom in revealing the flawed, messy self behind the image—showing that part both to yourself and to others. Usually, we feel shame when we involuntarily expose aspects of ourselves we’d prefer to keep hidden. I want to encourage you, though, rather than feeling ashamed of these parts, to acknowledge them, accept them, even love them.
It’s not easy to do; I know that from experience. I suspect, in fact, that most authentic lives are lived moving between the image and that which lies beneath it, that the trick is not to tear up the image once and for all, but to keep ripping it up over and over and over again.
How do you do this? At first, it occurred to me to suggest that you post a few bad selfies on Facebook or Instagram or wherever. I don’t mean a little bad, I mean really bad. Just to test yourself and see how attached you are to your own image.
But here’s the problem: these “bad” selfies aren’t you either; they’re still just reflections. By definition, an image can’t capture all your different angles, positions, expressions—even a video can’t do that. We’re changing from moment to moment—we may be feeling all sorts of contradictory ways at the same time—whereas the image, good or bad, is flat, one-dimensional, immutable, fixed.
So, instead, try doing an activity that you get so caught up in, you don’t even think about the photo or the image, so that you’re not thinking at all. Get so immersed in the moment that you completely forget you even have a self. Like when you’re running a race and you’re just running with no thought of who’s doing it or for what goal. Try playing music or writing code or cooking a meal or just quietly walking and admiring the newly budded leaves on a tree, like Mr. Cushman. The activity may or may not be image-worthy; that’s beside the point. The point is to get outside of yourself for a while, take a break from thinking about yourself and how you appear.
I’m not saying you can be engaged in every second of your life like this—as lovely as it might be—but I am saying that you can search for such moments and cultivate a life that consists of increasingly more such moments and that, if you’re lucky, you might have a job that provides you with such moments as teaching does me. (That’s a little tip, by the way: opportunities to be of service to others are a great way of getting beyond the image.)
But I fear that I’ve given you the impression that images are always bad. They’re not. Images are, in fact, the building blocks of literature. A literary image is a kind of verbal picture, a portrait or a still life made up of words. William Carlos Williams famously wrote that “so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens”—one of the most famous images in modern poetry. So much does indeed depend upon that image, upon images in general: a poem or a story or a novel rich in imagery offers us entry to another place, another time, another truth. By mirroring or reflecting our own world, the literary image gives us great insight into this world as well as great compassion and empathy for it. It does this through the related word: the “imagination.” It is through our remarkable ability to imagine that we can enter into the minds of other people and into the worlds they inhabit. The ability to imagine is what enables us to shed the narrow confines of the self and enter into deep communion with another being.
So, a little story before I conclude. When I first started working at College Prep, I was rather stiff in my teaching, believing that I had to live up to a certain image of a “good” teacher, and I was constantly trying to impress upon my students how smart and capable I was. The head of my department at the time was a teacher named Johnny Walker (yes, that’s really his name). He’s probably best remembered for his departing gift: a performance of the song “I Did It My Way.” In front of the entire school, Johnny began to sing the Frank Sinatra version of the song. About a quarter of the way in, he yanked off his suit and tie, revealing a ripped t-shirt underneath, and began singing—screaming, actually—the Sid Vicious version of the song. At the end of the performance, he threw himself backwards off the stage. When I asked him why he did that, he said, “Because I could hear myself going out of tune and I had to do something.” When I asked Johnny for advice about how to improve my teaching, he said, “The more you can let your students see you—really see you—the better a teacher you’ll be.”
So let other people see you—really see you—and actively search for opportunities to step away from your image, to examine what lies behind it. I don’t know what you’ll find there—the point is more to look and wonder, then look some more.
And may I suggest one more thing? Have compassion for yourself and for others who may be entranced or entrapped by their ghostly images. Especially today, in an age where the image does not vanish but lives on forever in the afterlife of the internet, haunting us perpetually, demanding more and more of our energy and time, remember that there’s an actual human being behind the picture.
To sum up, don’t waste your precious time photoshopping your image and getting it just right. Instead, find the courage to reveal the messy-haired, unvarnished person behind it. Cultivate this imperfect self, let it guide you, and let the image be simply that: a reflection of your own messy, amazing, extraordinary being.
Thank you, Class of 2014.
June 8th, 2014