Personas

This post courtesy of insomnia.  A more awake tom would probably not be doing this, but, hey, if you can’t be self-indulgent when sleep deprived, when can you be?

One of the first poems I enjoyed was Dunbar’s “We Wear The Mask.”  While he may have meant it to refer to the cultural issues facing African Americans in white society following the civil war (if I remember correctly), I always thought it was a good statement on the human condition.  We all wear masks, we all wear personas, we all indulge certain aspects of ourselves at different times.  For most of us, our work selves differ from our selves at home or with friends.  Different with acquaintances than with lovers.  Most of us, I suspect, have identities we keep to ourselves, only allowing them from thei iron masks when no one is around to see the resemblance.

On this blog, I have made a conscious choice to be open, but not very personal, in the prose.  The persona I inhabit here is one that I intend to keep “up front” with you, but, ultimately, responds “Fine,” when asked “How you doin’?”  I didn’t want to be incredibly self-indulgent and, not writing under any pseudonym, a certain remove seemed appropriate.  Really, anyone I know could easily  tie this blog to me without me telling them about it.  It seemed better to keep the sorts of things I wouldn’t tell acquaintances off this blog.  At times I wish I had written with a pseudonym and could be self-indulgent without remorse.  Some people write journals, I suppose, for that, but it’s the idea that people do read this, that, in some manner, find value or interest or entertainment in what I write that gives purpose to the writing.  It clarifies, refines, but also limits.

That only applies to the prose.  The verse is pretty much unfiltered.  I think as artists we’re baring ourselves in our work and the most remove we get is a gauze veil…. Not that the verse gets the level of unmitigated self-pitying I might be in the mood for at the moment. I wouldn’t even want to read that drek.  It will be used, burned as an offering to the muses, turned into an obfuscated memoir of stanzas.  So, in honor of keeping things hidden, feelings, identities, etc.:

We Wear The Mask - Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

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