Short Description of a Person

Nobody knew his real name and why everyone called him Not Again (spoken as one word) was a mystery. However, I decided to describe his physical appearance systematically to see if that gave some sort of clue. This may indeed entail describing how actually I go about describing him, not only as he looks today, but seeking out any photographs through a cross-section in time from his birth until now nearly seventy years later - and then describing the figure as depicted in those photographs. I do not intend to describe his character or his behaviour as I have only spoken to him once - a few days ago - and a description of his character or behaviour at any point in time would only be true for that particular point in time, thus possibly giving a skewed picture overall. I will therefore devote myself mainly to his face and head over a long period of time, the area of the body where photographs tend to centre upon. Of course, some of the older photographs of Notagain are in black and white, so that fact should be taken into account.

The first photograph available to me was taken when he was a babe in arms. (Funny how one used the word 'taken' in the context of photography). Not much to gather here, except his later facial likeness to his mother who is also featured in the early photograph. His clothes cannot be seen other than a cradle grab with frayed ends in which his mother has swaddled him.

In the second one, Notagain is a bit older, say, about three or four. It looks posed in a back garden somewhere. Just standing in dungarees and t shirt, a sandpit in the background, and his face makes him seem like one of those rare children where one thinks it is easy to visualise the adult from the child. A face that has the intrinsic self built in, looking old already, despite naive eyes and a weak chin. The left hand is held in a rather unconscious effeminate manner. Nothing should be inferred from this look and stance, but it is difficult to blot from one's mind the finished product whom you met in real life, with colour and three-dimensionally, met for the first time a few days ago.

The next photographic glimpse was evidently taken when our subject was at university about fifty years ago, clumsily standing akimbo, much thinner than he turned out to be when I met him a few days ago. Slightly fragile, standing on the roof of some building, but while the roof was dead flat, he himself was sloping. Shy face, withdrawn, demonstrating a puckish sort of witty intelligence. It was still in black and white, because typically most of the time during that era there lacked any colour in or out of photographs. No selfies, no relentless industry of Facebook pictures again and again, streaming down the ages. Whether he was called Notagain then, I am not sure, for probably that was never his real name. How could it have been?

In all these photographs, he had a round face, with glasses, and gradually a scrubby sort of beard, but a healthy crop of black hair. He never looked in charge of his own environment, but now I am about to describe photographs that were more and more developed in colour. Would my descriptions change along with what the medium served to reveal? A whole swathe of photographs passing in front of me, where colour was often just as blurred as the earlier black and white. Smudged with a glaring unreality that life never possessed. Any description of a person needs to cope with both time and change, not only the time and change of the subject itself but of the various ways of recording that subject's life. Family holiday photos depicting the same sloping figure on hills and beaches. The weight of his head seeming to overbalance him.

Life grew more real as well as the means of depicting that life more dependable, the nature of that head becoming clearer, Notagain himself proving that he had never changed, just growing older, more visible, now seen in colour, the inconsistencies and blemishes of his complexion more marked. One wonders how his behaviour changed, but there is only so much that an old photo can convey. It was the eyes that froze the path between then and now. Not bedroom eyes, as women often call the eyes of beefcake film stars, but something I can only describe as never again eyes. Eyes that crossed their fingers that life would renew itself but never duplicate. Eyes squeezed smaller and smaller, as the head grew bigger and bigger. But I fear they are essentially the same eyes, the same look, following through the years till now.

A few days ago, when I met him, his face looked quite old, so old that one wondered if calling himself Notagain served any purpose at all. The barely visible crewcut like a baby's, the scrubby beard now scraped into hundreds of dead grey insects, the vestigial eyebrows the same black as that much earlier youthful crop of hair, although it is now a faded black despite my crystal clear view of it. The witty gloom of the expression. The moondog smirk.

I can't ask him questions, because this is meant to be a description of a person, not a story of interaction between us, I guess, although, if I layer all the photos I've seen of him against his real face like a multi palimpsest or veil, he would look more like an abstract painting than a person. Something in that womb nearly seventy years ago, just as colourful inside that womb as it was outside, if given the supply of lights in there. No glimpses then, no sneaky shots that predicted who you would be once out of that darkness into the bright new world. A being that eventually came together from all manner of future descriptions. An accretion of time's triangulated angles.

If any just-born baby could talk, it might complain, I guess, NOT AGAIN.
But if things never change, those same things can never die.