Friday 29 June 2012

I - aye, I'd eyed - Self-portrait as Velasquez's 'Mars'



I wake up with no memory of who I am. A card in my pocket with a name on it. I google the name.

There are three candidates for me.

1. An apparently unambitious artist with no evidence of a career in the past or future.
2. A dull-sounding librarian (is there any other kind?) working at a library at an institute at a university. Why so many 'ats'?
3. A cage-fighter.

I think I must be the cage-fighter. I feel like I have had many injuries, that this body is a patchwork carcass of wornleather over scar-tissue and gristle. I can imagine the violent rage nurtured in a boy with a softy first name. Maybe I escaped from my cage in a post-fight stupor looking for somewhere to lay me down, to find some place less cagey.