Ego where I go
It is strange for me to not write each day. The confusion of existing in two states with so much business to take care of has left my public space a blank. But not my private one. Eventually, I will get back to keeping up on the public goings on, but for now I’ve just been taking it a day at a time. This has been the longest hiatus I’ve had in years from writing. The ephemeral nature of my thoughts keeps urging me to get back to writing, in the fear that so much of what I’ve been working my way through will just disappear.
Sometimes, people say, you just have to take time for your “self.” I’m hazy on that concept. Just what is a “self” anyway? I tend to think of my “self” as fractured and heading a thousand directions at once. I was very amused by Harold Bloom’s contention in a recent Atlantic interview:
You like to tell your students, “There is no method except yourself.” What do you mean by that?
I believe that very passionately. My friend Paul de Man with whom, as I say, I used to argue endlessly, would tell me that after a lifetime of searching, he had found the method, the “Troot,” as he put it—that Belgian pronunciation of “Truth.” I would say, “No, dear Paul, there is no Truth. There is only the Self.”
What theory did the great critics have? Critics like Dr. Samuel Johnson or William Hazlitt? Those who adopt a theory are simply imitating somebody else. I believe firmly that, in the end, all useful criticism is based upon experience. An experience of teaching, an experience of reading, one’s experience of writing—and most of all, one’s experience of living. Just as wisdom, in the end, is purely personal. There can be no method except the Self.
The self seems to me a room full of mirrors, reflecting imperfectly all that we have experienced. Our conception of “self” is always skewed like a fun-house mirror. So, for Bloom then, the only real method is self-involved perversion? I was amused by that thought.
Who I am is inseparable from those I have known. I watch my mother cope with the changes in her life, and I see myself. It might be a matter of biology, but then again, it could just be my own urge to shape the world in my own image. I’m not sure that there is an escape from that, and yet I feel certain that the answers are not inside me, but rather, out there somewhere. Otherwise, there would be no reason to do anything except sit under the Bo tree.
* noted for my own reference: I wonder what Harold Bloom would say about the extreme modes of self-consciousness referenced in this post by Ampersand and the ensuing comment debate?
