I am rambling this morning.
I love thinking about our different conceptions of the “self.”
From Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” monologue to Carroll’s caterpillar asking “Who are you?” literature is riddled (quite literally) with questions about the self.
What is it made of? Who influences it? Where does it reside? What changes it? How does it work?
In a poem I love, John Glenday writes:
“The atoms of us, falling towards the centre
of whatever everything is. And we don’t see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That’s what weight is, that communal process of falling.”
Do you have a core self you are, and always are? Or are you an ever-shifting combination of impossible forces: cells and physics and chemical reactions that is less a stable oneness than a sum of changing parts?
(My very favorite poem about that question will always be “Machinery” by Robert Wrigley.)
Earlier this year, when we read The House of Mirth together, there was no universal agreement on Lily Bart. Some people love her, some people hate her, some people change their minds every few pages or chapters.
Same goes for Newland Archer and May Welland and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence. It’s hard to know who they truly are — what is their true self — both when we’re given limited access to their inner thoughts (like for May and Ellen) and when we’re given lots of access to their inner thoughts (like Newland, through whom we experience most of the novel’s happenings).
Selves are a tricky thing to pin down.
And their attendant behaviors, actions, choices: trickier to understand, still.
Most of us end up admitting, at some point, that we don’t really like what these people are choosing, doing, pursuing—are they becoming someone we don’t like? Or have they always been that way and we just couldn’t see it?
From another angle, from another vantage, would we see their actions anew? Would that angle itself change their self?
Or would it be us, in our shifted position, who had changed?
This is one of the reasons I love these books so much.
“What's your name,” Coraline asked the cat. “Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?”
“Cats don't have names,” it said.
“No?” said Coraline.
“No,” said the cat. “Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.”
Real people do unlikable things all the time out here in the real world and I still care about them very much. Real people are made up of all kinds of contradictory impulses and desires, and we still tend to meet them for coffee or play a game of cards together.
As we read about Lily’s shifting allegiances — to herself, to men, to the kind of society she wants to inhabit — we likewise shift. As we watch Lily flail in the tides of the social, we likewise flail to gather clarity. Is she right to hold out? Is she self righteous? Is she an artist? Is she a sex object?
Is NewlandArcher a fool? A jerk? A dreamer? A victim?
Is May actually empty inside? Does Ellen care about any of them at all?
Multiplicities, all.
This is intentional work, on Wharton’s part, to give us deeply complex portraits of selfhood, despite the shallowness of their rigid social setting and the pervasiveness of their well-trained behaviors.
I think this is the feat of a great story: to show you a complicated, confusing little bundle of personality and looks and attitudes and choices and ask you to pay attention.
These stories ask you to get what’s at stake for that self in that situation. And to care.
In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf writes,
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”
I think Glenday must’ve read this. He must’ve been thinking about Woolf’s famous stream-of-consciousness definition when he wrote, “The atoms of us, falling towards the centre / of whatever everything is.”
I read somewhere this week that Woolf liked to write standing up at her desk, so she could walk away at any moment to get a different view.
Edith Wharton liked to write in bed. She’d sit with a stack of looseleaf paper and write with her inked quill and when she was done with a page, she’d gently thrust it off the top of the stack, letting it leaf in the breeze of her open bedroom windows.
Some pages landed on the floor; others scattered around her. Organizing them, putting them together in a pattern or a story, would come later. She was recording the atoms as they fell.
“Set wide the window,” Wharton writes in a poem from her early years, “Let me drink the day.” She wants perspective. Wide open vistas. A full landscape for the imagination; she wants to “drink” in the day, to sate herself on its myriad views.
LM Montgomery’s Anne Shirley longs to drink in the magic of the world around her. In fact, she uses her imagination to break out of all kinds of mental and social prisons—to give her self “more scope for the imagination,” as she often puts it.
She even briefly renames herself Cordelia, because she thinks she might be more likable self — and therefore adoptable child — with a romantic name like that. She transforms everyday scenes into the sublime: conjuring the Light Way Delight and The Lake of Shining Waters from the dirt roads and ponds of Avonlea.
In other words, Anne uses her imagination to expand and improve: to make the world she sees a more lovely and beautiful place, because she imagines it to be so.
My therapist tells me some parts of our lives really do feel like chapters, and that I’ve spent a lot of a recent chapter daydreaming. “You can keep the dream,” she tells me gently one early Friday morning. “You can just swap out the characters or change the setting” she says.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
I wonder about this. I try new scenes out in my mind as I lay awake in the morning, in that dusky dreamscape between sleeping and waking, and the basic plot stays the same but, if I cast someone new in the role, the whole thing changes. The dialogue needs tweaking; the setting needs a refresh.
This precious, evolving self needs a new environment for that story to hold; my self needs permission to shift.
“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.”
In Fleabag, the titular self admits she just wants someone to tell her how to live and who to love, because she’s mortified that she’s doing everything wrong. That, given the responsibility of managing a whole self, all to herself, she’s not up to task. She’s afraid to fail. She’s afraid to get it wrong—whether it means something in a grander cosmos or means nothing at all.
Perhaps the latter is even more frightening.
(Perhaps I’ve never resonated with a monologue so much before.)
What part of our self sweeps into an expanse of unlimited potential and starts to limit it? Starts to put a cage around it or a mask on it?
What parts of our self fit tidily into the spaces provided—and which parts can’t fit no matter how hard they try?
After marrying the girl he didn’t want to marry in The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer “took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage.”
And then he wonders: '“After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles.”
But it’s not a happy filing-down; it’s not a willing loss:
“The worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.”
What parts of yourself do you lose to the pressure of other selves? Even in love? Even from the best intentions?
It’s not the free part of us that fits into these spaces.
What parts are already gone? Which parts were you okay to part with? Which parts continue to itch like a phantom limb in the night?
It’s not the imagination part.
Can you grow them back? Are they gone forever?
It’s whatever part of us—and the other parts of other selves all around us—that made the other parts feel like a dirty little secret.
It’s the part of us that loves safety and acceptance and security, rightfully and evolutionarily so, and believes it must have the perfect conditions in order to live.
And yet, in the imperfect conditions of reality, we all continue to live. That’s the uninteresting part, says Margaret Atwood. For real meaning, “try for How and Why,” she writes.
And that’s the task that really craves the richness of selfhood.
Discovering your How and your Why comes not from the linking logic of the mind’s favorite, well-researched pathways—those well-tread rationalities, gifted down through the wisdom of generations and time. They come, so much great literature and poetry and thinking tells us, from the impossible futures and freeing potentials of whatever is not and won’t be.
You have to access that powerful part of you; maybe it sits dormant.
You have to find that place inside of you that is also somewhere far beyond you: like the child-wonder Matilda does: “She was feeling curiously elated. She felt as though she had touched something that was not quite of this world, the highest point of the heavens, the farthest star.”
The multiplicities of ourselves refract endlessly into the composite picture of what could happen but probably won’t.
Is that where true selfhood sits? Between the daydream and the waking, in that liminal drifting space between the persistent tugs that urge us in a million different directions, all at once, all the time?
“The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.”
—Mary Oliver
Curiouser and curiouser.
That poem, Machinery, is wonderful. Thanks for the link. My dad’s vocabulary was like that, too, as he was an engineer.
I love the way you weave from classic literature references to quoting Fleabag.
I’ve never read Age of Innocence but now want to!