The self-portrait does not paint an image of the subject seen from outside, but rather reveals an inner vision of the self. Within us all lies a densely packed arrangement of ordered chaos in the form of vital and desirable organs, complex sets of networks and mechanical structure. Each does its own job, but each works in conjunction with each. This is not a simple task, and the product is poetry.

Reading this poem, we conduct a vivisection, we test the body by experimenting with its various entwined threads, searching for that predictive order in order to generate meaning by some inductive process. We look for its skeleton and muscles in the words and syntax, its skein of nerves connecting and co-ordinating in the sonics of the piece, and its actions in the narrative. In this poem, the precise meaning is obscure but the essence is not. It is that interior vision of the self with the understanding that we do not know the self as seen from the outside. Induction is not proof of the future any more than self-knowledge is knowledge of the self.

After all, we believe our consciousness, while it might reside within the physical components of the body, to be somehow linked but something separate. We cannot prove this, but to disprove it is equally difficult. We understand our mind in a different way to our body. So, by looking at the similarities between us, can a self-portrait of, say, a dog be constructed. Possibly, but I believe not. To do so would gift the portraitist the nature of a dog and, this being incomprehensible to us humans, only dogs might have this.1 And dogs seem uninterested in the construction of self-portraits—or poems.

This poem is packed with detail, making it seem dense, but there is space hidden beneath the skin. The opening of this space provides for comparison or fear, contrasting the familiar with the familiar in unusual ways, or leaving the thoughts hanging in mid-concept, vertiginously clinging to any belief in meaning. It can produce a vacuum that longs to be filled by understanding, by things, forced there by the surroundings and the pressure of it all. It can conflate human with beast, or link them through thin chords of thought.

Here we do not know whether we are thinking about dog or man. Here we do not know whether we are talking about Francis Bacon or Francis Bacon, the artist thinking in colours and pigments or the meta-physicist painting in concepts and predictions, or the gap between each, or both, or between each pair. 

Francis Bacon the artist painted 'Man and Dog' in which the subjects are shown as entwined bodies, sharing shape and colour, almost impossible, but not quite, to disentangle.2 It is as if each has been stripped of their outer disguise and are revealed to share the same internal mechanism, the same viscera. Not exactly a self-portrait, more a superimposed diptych, offering both sides of the personalities: human and beast. Images that are different but the same, a peculiar reflective congruence.

Reading this piece aloud, life can be heard to be pulsing within, within the meter of the lines, within the assonances between the words and varying sonic landscapes of each and every stanza. The slowly expanding stanzas steadily interrogate the story within, be it of creation, guts, distinction or death. And read aloud, the experience of listening is soon over, as the sound dissipates into randomness. The vibrations, like the dog, have a short life.

Consider 'Painting of a Dog'. Consider 'Self-Portrait'. This is neither. This is a poem.

notes

1. Wittgenstein considers the communication of cross-species experience in Philosophical Investigations Part II fragment 327.

2. An image of the painting can be seen at https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/man-dog

martin porter