When I was a few months into this drawing sequence I came across a poem by Ezra Pound that helped clarify for me exactly what I was doing with my alter ego figure Sidney.  I don’t know if I had been groping around in the dark with this subject and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley had helped shine a light on it, or if I had just liked the ideas in the poem so much that I decided to rip them off.  Whatever the proper sequence - it all seemed to just “click” after Mauberley.  I can even remember exactly where I was when I was reading it - in that “where-were-you-when-you-heard_______” kind of way.  I remember reading the main poems in Part II and having the realization that the kind of aesthetic sterility and self indulgence being described were very much akin to what I had been critiquing myself for.  I felt completely skewered! (see the quoted lines below)



The poem itself, while relative brief, is quite complicated.  I would go on to devote a harrowing year of my life to decoding it my 150 page undergraduate thesis. In brief - It consists of a series of 18 poems.  As one might expect in Pound, there are lots of allusions and intricate references; but the real tension and complexity comes about from the way these individual poems are written in various personae.  In one poem the narrator is disparaging a recently deceased poet with the initials E.P. Is the voice of this poem meant to be Pound’s? Mauberley’s? Many of the later poems are suffused with polysyllabic latinate words.  Whose style is this? Pound’s? E.P.’s? Mauberley’s? The pronouncements in these various poems are intense, sometimes extreme, and, at times, even vicious. But is it Pound who is really saying these things.

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I was reminded of Randy Newman’s “Short People.”  It is an outrageous (and very funny) expression of seeming contempt for short people.  “How can Randy Newman be so insensitive?” was the cry that went out at the time; but Randy Newman wasn’t the one who was insensitive.  It was the so-called “guy in the song.”  These days, of course, we have Stephen Colbert and Sarah Silverman, and this tactic has been popularly milked for laughs for years. What gets our approval and holds our interest is that we know that Stephen Colbert’s persona is the exact opposite of that which he is portraying.  What if his persona were more or less just like him - but only slightly different?  What if his persona’s subject of discussion were Stephen Colbert himself?  What if Stephen Colbert were discussing his “only-slightly-different-from-him” persona’s discussion of Stephen Colbert? 

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This turns into the kind of endless series of reflections that can turn back on itself.  Think of old fashioned barber shops with mirrors on multiple walls or 3-way mirrors in a clothing store’s dressing room.  You can see yourself receding off to infinity.  But what if each successive reflections were just a tiny bit different from the original?  Pretty soon you would be entirely differentiated from that “other you.”