dekho dekho dekho dekho dekho

By the time he was well on his way his looks had become a major problem. He hadn’t been a particularly bonny child or a strapping lad and came upon youth with nothing that could be described as his style. But then an attitude emerged and as slow as that was it brought with itself a dressing sense that stuck to the straight and the narrow but was nonetheless adequate for that. The minimalism then became his style. He wasn’t slow to detect the incipient strokes of a personality and was automatically amenable to the idea of devoting time and effort to complete a portrait that was still only very faint to him. But in so conceptualising his mission he was inevitably transfixed by the notion of the visible as the beautiful thing and in light of the selfsame understanding became preoccupied with mephistophelean questions like what a portrait is and how a portrait looks instead of the platonic ones of what a portrait is and what a portrait should be. And now he serves his curiosity and suits his artistry by spending longer and longer in front of the mirror. Passing any reflecting surface he never misses the chance to take another look at himself, justifying what is by now indisputably a raging vanity complex with an ugly duckling-like chastity. In fact, a major chunk of the personality-building exercise consists in constantly monitoring and reviewing the status of his face and by extension appearance, which are ultimately separate things. The distinction allows him to treat the one thing with affected carelessness while being ceaselessly conscious of the other, an arrangement that upholds the lobe-structure theory of mind, giving him not so much a personality as many personas.