Lately #3:The Blur of the Self
Lately I've been thinking about the blur that is the self and the ways we try to define it.
I first focused, this week, on this idea because of Sheila Heti's "Diary in Alphabetical Order" that's appearing in installments in the Times. Heti loaded ten years worth of journaling into Excel and ordered her sentences alphabetically, then cut them down and blurred her characters, creating something more akin to fiction. She says it best in her intro to the piece: "The self's report on itself is surely a great fiction." The de- and re-contextualization of her thoughts provides a poignancy and power oftentimes missing from streams of consciousness or purely diaristic writing. The D section really got me-- all those "dont's."
In the three pages of his essay “Chewing Gum,” Karl Ove Knausgaard captures so succinctly the desire to be a respectable person capable of interacting smoothly and without shame in social situations-- and failing. He chews a piece of gum, it ends up wadded and hidden in his fist, and he bends the story in such a way that the circumstance and his remembrance of it become somehow comforting and even artful. You can listen to it here.
I'm reading Returning to Reims (not done yet!), in which the French sociologist Didier Eribon considers the way his working class upbringing shaped his consciousness, particularly as he felt it was something to feel ashamed of, react against, and erase from the persona he presented to the world. The return referenced in the title is to his childhood home and family, both of which he'd been mostly estranged from for thirty years as he fashioned his identity as a member of the intellectual class and a gay man. His narrative is both deeply personal and a reflection on the exploitative society that shaped both him and his family.
Thank you so much for reading. I love sharing what I've been thinking about, and I'm so glad you are willing to take a look.
Until next week,
S