Wittgenstein writes, "If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit."

Sometimes, perhaps, I photograph myself touching variegated, longevity-delicate objects
to satisfy a future fear of temporal dissonance.

Not an I-was-there, therefore, I'm-here proof that can be self-evident, deductive,

but as a shaky clause in the premise.

Somewhat more accurately, I fear that in the future I won't feel dissonance.

* * *

What really annoys me about my experience in the world: I need constant reaffirmation of my own existence;

meanwhile, material phenomena seems unrelated (and unrelate-able) to my doubt.

So what's with this, 

my only self-portrait in a two hour hotel room, 

shot at the beginning of the first hour,

my camera and my body disappearing into the anonymous darkness,

darkness that becomes a doorway,

doorway that leads away from reflection

framed with guise of capture?

I'm finishing the Maggie Nelson as I sit at the computer. 

Here's an excerpt from the chapter "The Brutality of Fact" with additional linebreaks: 

Writing, especially autobiographical writing, can be a hothouse of self-deceptions,
but it also has the uncanny ability to expose self-deceptions
with the formidable exactitude of surgery.

Most distressing, perhaps for the reader and writer alike,
is when both function appear to be underway simultaneously.

This is not rare.
It could be one description of "the writing process."

It is also a good description of the particularly acute vacillation
between insight and self-delusion that characterizes addictive thinking [...]

* * *

I argue (here, often) that self-portraits (and perhaps photography in most cases) works in a similar vein.

Also, I have been called out on having used self-deceptions in this blog
to perpetuate (or at least mimic) 

my own addictive thinking.

The self-portraits are included.

[The irony of me writing all this, among a battlefield of personal writing/photographs has not gone unnoticed.]

* * *

Earlier in the chapter, she writes this:

* * *

I've been on both sides of this experience and won't tell you which I hated least (or loved most, depending) --

writer vs. the one written about

(even as the writer brutally self-exposes)

or 

photographer vs. the one photographed

(even as the photographer brutally self-exposes).

I've been on both sides of this experience within my singular self.

I've been unwilling to know myself even as I microscoped my flesh to count the scissor marks and cells.

Deceit has been part of my knowing.

I've taken pride in the concealment/revelation.

I never imagined you/I couldn't see through it.

Sometimes, only, I feared you/I wouldn't.