The I is the ninth letter of the alphabet and it might just be my least favorite one. It is a pretty hefty subject to take on, and I don’t know why I even bother trying. David Berman once wrote about the way girls would call out ‘love you!’, conveniently leaving out the I as if they didn’t want to commit to their own declarations. (As if that isn’t enough painful truth for one paragraph, for ages I used to think that Georges Bataille’s novel was called Story of the I, and I have always avoided it for that. So I guess in a way this is me trying to read Bataille.)
I do think that the pain of commitment is the primary pain of writing, which is how I came to think of this - I am reading Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño which he claims to be the only novel of his that does not embarrass him, and I can see why. It is as if, to phrase it as the novel itself does, all I can come up with are stray sentences, maybe because reality seems to me as a swarm of stray sentences. The book, to me, is like a crowd of people analyzing a car crash, but one where all the spectators happened to have arrived after the fact. Yet when the TV crew arrives, they all fall over each other to tell the story. The back cover speaks of a few dream sequences, and there might be only one character called Bolaño in there, but I think the whole thing is like a dream and every character is a light shard that is cast off from Bolaño. Which, ultimately, makes me wonder how many light shards I cast off in my time? I am me, yet I feel like I have either yet to meet myself or we’ve just been introduced and are only vaguely acquainted.
“I disagree”, I interrupt myself.
(I’m sorry, this happens a lot lately.)
“Not now,” I retort somewhat petulantly, “I am trying to write something on my blog.”
“But this concerns me,” I say.
“Fine, what’s on my mind?”
“If I met myself only recently, then why do my memories of myself go back so far? I can see flashes of my whole life, and I am in every one of them.”
“Fine,” I admit somewhat begrudgingly. “Perhaps I kid myself. As I said, this is a tricky subject to me. What do I propose then? And don’t say ‘from birth’, that’s too easy.”
“Theory of mind,” I simply answer. “From the moment one becomes aware of the fact that other people can think just like oneself can, he or she becomes aware of the I from an external point of view.”
I do not reply, but instead go for a neighborhood stroll to mull this over. This does not save me from myself - or I from myself, for that matter - and the internal dialogue continues.
“Ok, fine, theory of mind, so why do I feel I hardly know who I am? Or, that there is no me because there’s only constant change. The moment I define myself I have already changed and have to update the definition.”
“You should look at it from my side,” I butt in, from the shop window I happen to pass by. “There’s not just the I and the reflective I, there’s also a Jeroen. Which is the I as people collectively build you up. And it does not... Hey! Wait,” I shout as I nearly move my own reflection into oblivion. I convince myself to halt before the window. People on the street throw me puzzled looks. “Thanks. As I was saying, this Jeroen person changes too, sure, but it does not keep up with the I and the myself. It is far more steady and therefore it is what defines you most of all.”
Pensively, I look at myself for a minute or two, and then I have a flash of insight. I move my reflection in the shop window such that it reflects back in a mirror behind me, creating a Droste effect. “This,” I say triumphantly, quite pleased with my own cleverness, “is how I feel about this. Like I say, I think there is a constant shift of the self, it is never what it was before, and not even the sum of what it was. But I guess there are many selves fading away into the past, like these mirror images do.
A myriad of voices reply, most of me protesting my forthcoming desuetude, though it is hard to make out from the cacophony I create. I suggest to move to a plural form, to unify my voices. I take a vote and we all turn out to be on the same page. Enjoying the peace, we say: “It is so nice that we are all here, and that we are all of one mind. It makes me feel at ease, which is hard for me with other people.”
We nod. “Yes, it is nice,” we say. “No one else can hear us.”
“What about me,” God butts in somewhat imperiously.
“You don’t exist,” we reply.
“Oh,” sulks God, pouting his lips in childish disappointment, as he starts to disappear.
“Wait,” I interject, separating myself from the bunch.
“Yes?” comes God’s voice from far-away. There are faint, white glimmers of hope sticking to his black voice of desperation.
I wanted to tell God that he is just one of us, just another figment of my imagination, another side of me, that he is welcome to join the party, so long as his god-complex does not get in the way (that might be a problem), that he should lay off a bit on the magnanimity, and should just try to be one of the crew for a while, that he might just like it. But, in fact, the desperation is too much. “Never mind,” I say decidedly. And then, adding to myself: “Having to explain myself to God kind of takes the kick out of the concept of omniscience.”
Everyone agrees.
“Now, where were we?”
