Clarity

I was meeting colleagues at Singapore’s Changi Airport en route to Tokyo. One of them I’d not met before. How to best describe myself? ‘I’ll be the guy who looks like a bird that has flown into a marshmallow,’ I say over the phone. The sentence floated easily into my head, but its aptness surprised me. It was the perfect image of the bio-merging of my sharply birdish dad’s people (from who knows where) and those on my more expansive mum’s Danish-throwback side.

Each night as I look in the mirror before bed it’s this collision that looks back. Born of strange opposites, I see my grandmother’s possum-dark eyes, my dad’s equine nose, my grandfather’s Buddha ears, my uncle’s colossal forehead, my mum’s tough and rounded jawline. I see these elements as part-creatures, not belonging to me, roaming carelessly over my face and body. What I don’t see in this flesh-ghosted self is a distinct entity. I see an indeterminate being prey to random, flickering genetic hauntings.

Indeed, being about about two neurotic turns away from a full-blown biomorphic body disorder mess, there’s a big part of me that can’t even recall what I look like, that has no idea about what and how I am as a physical entity. I have often idly wondered whether I have a case of personal prosopagnosia: an inability to recognise my face as my face, my body as my body. I am a mysterious other I can never quite recall whether I know or not. This shames me, because it feels even in mid life as if I am a boy-man with no real edges to his being, a person who is not a person yet.

Naturally, therefore, crafting my indeterminateness into a specific shape has been a lifetime’s minor preoccupation. From childhood I have been fascinated with transforming my malleable plastic self into the defined people I have seen on TV, in magazines, in bands, in the films: Ben Cross as Harold Abrahams, Lee Majors as Steve Austin, Robert Conrad in Baa Baa Black Sheep, Michael Stipe as Michael Stipe, Bernard Sumner as Bernard Sumner, Adrian Tomine as Adrian Tomine. However, as I always had a bunch of competing idols of vastly different shapes, sizes and style codes, I never committed wholeheartedly to anything. These beautiful ‘better-than-mes’ just slipped off, remaining beings of my mind and never my body.

Having learned how to trick out my bicycle lovely part by lovely part over the last half-decade allowed me to hope I could translate this velo-dandyism to my body. Filled with this new optimism I’ve become increasingly obsessed with at least one last shot at fashioning myself into reality before I fade into insignificance. I spend a little too much iPad time on the style blogs and online men’s fashion shops: A Continuous Lean, The Bengal Stripe, endclothing, Kaufman Mercantile and Oi Polloi being my favourites right now. With great stuff oozing out of every cyber-pore these days, being inspired is dizzyingly easy.

What to do with it all is the hard thing. Do I simply embrace the stuff I like and make a look out of that, a kind of eclecticism? Go for a neo-Americana-Wolfman-clog-Jpop-Scando-knapsack-track-tweed-transatlantic-male-Jodie-Foster-Monocle-sheer? This approach is perfect for my indecision but no matter how many pairs of shoes or glasses or bags I buy I am never transformed into one of those hip eclectic peeps one finds on The Selby and the like. I just look like some older brother-type with too much shiny and plastic stuff dangling off him.
Trying the opposite approach, I’ve been sauntering into shops to buy suits with the idea of becoming a dapper modernist. I speak with snappy Italian ladies about material and cut, enquire of sullen portly men about dry-cleaning, and just can’t cross the line. It feels wrong for me, like a loss. I back away, ‘Yeah, I’ll have a think and swing by later.’ ‘Boy-man,’ I can hear them muttering after me.

There have been times when I have pushed through my typical floundering. Over the last year I have gone for a relaxedly down-to-earth restaurant owner look, a buttoned-up Euro-geek-prep look, a city woodsman look, a neo-skin look, and my old fallback, an Andrew McCarthy look. Oddly, though, I employed the same outfit for all: the basics being dark jeans or heavy tapered-leg cotton chinos and a check shirt. The shifts between looks were made in the way I wore my collar and facial hair, and how I held my shoulders and lifted my head as I walked down the corridor at work. Each time I thought I was doing something radical, but no-one noticed.

Seems that no matter what I do I drift hopelessly back to a single fashion vice. As much as I love it I had always thought of my crumpled jeans and checked shirt combo as a holding piece, one I’d grow out of as I turned into who I would really be. Yet maybe this costume has been softly holding the clarity I’ve been seeking all along. I could look at it as a casual-work-wear clarity that captures my essential no-placedness. It ‘defines’ a plain, fleshy male of no specific age, no clear social position and no particular subcultural affiliation: a standard guy.

Well, at least now I can see I already have the uniform to perform this non-role. I think it also means I need to embrace my fashion statement as a kind of melancholic anti-fashion statement. I can’t say it’s the kind of clarity I was looking for, but my colleague and I did find each other at Changi. And now I know what to look for, maybe I’ll find me too.

© Bob Charles 2011