Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Others

You don't know where they all come from.

Indeed, there some amongst the you don't even recognize, wearing counter-cultural clothing, odd hair arrangements, body markings.

You don't even know how many will appear for this meeting, but that is not a new condition--you are used to that coefficient of uncertainty.

Can we, you say, get this started? A decision is needed.

Passive voice, someone from the rear shouts. Can't tolerate freaking passive voice.

You sense a familiar presence there, a personality you have come to think of as The Playground Bully.

Who's in charge? someone challenges. Ah, your old pal, The Challenger.

I am, you say.

Define your terms, another voice chimes in. What exactly is I?

Ah, you think, The Sceptic Show-Off made it. The I, you reply with what you consider equipoise, is a conglomeration of chemicals, neural paths and circuitry, a genomic configuration, and a tidal range of attitudes.

Well said, a voice pipes up from the rear and you are pleased to see you have some support in this group of cynics and rock throwers.

Rise to a point of clarification, a voice says.

State your point.

Are you the you who got us in trouble that last time out by volunteering to take on that dumb editing job which we all tried to warn you against, or are you the you who led the charge in that argument against Poe?

The latter, you say.

There is a murmur of approval and a sense they are all settling down to let you run the meeting, which is a good thing because a decision needs to be made and screw the consequences of that locution being an active or passive voice, the bottom line is the need for a decision.

Who are you to make that decision?

You are all the above, the various parts of you, known and unknown, who attend the congressional meeting, cynical, skeptical, fearful of filibuster, distraction, or some last-minute attachment that will allow/cause you to buy that iPhone or $1200 steam/pump espresso machine you had set well off to the side because of its rampant impracticality.

You have long understood you and other homo sapiens are multiple personality, been aware that only a handfull of other homo saps suffer from the problem of not realizing the variant nature of the self and have come to firmly believe that who ever is in charge at a given moment is the Only One, sort of like the dictatorial presence in North Korea.

It is rare that you can agree on anything. Like the Brits, Canadians, and Israelis, you are no stranger to coalitions, meaning that strange bedfellows come together within your brain pan, rendering you a kind of walking Yugoslavia while Tito was still in power. In some ways, this causes you to sympathize with dictators. Salazar, to thee I dedicate/A Lowenkopfian fairy state. But in recent years the rampant mischief of Pervez Musharaff has caused you to consider the historic blunders of supporting whoever seems to have the most power, which is almost invariably held by use of fear. There are enough things to fear in life without becoming a magnet for new sources.

"I, in my intricate image,..." wrote Dylan Thomas.

And you are that, a multiple personality, a series of delegates scurrying about in search of a coalition in order to take a stand, interpret the complexity of an emotion, understand the clear sympathy of music, present a sentence that vibrates with the force of your own breath and enthusiasm.

Going through your old stories, your pocket-worn Moleskines, reviews you wrote on books you have long since forgotten you'd read in the first place, you come across sentences, sometimes even paragraphs that make you wonder, what stranger found my notes and old stories and now wants to mess with my head by setting in this material, this wisdom I did not know I had, this love of existence I did not know resided within me. Surely then it was one of The Others, those inhabitants of this self I had yet to identify, have coffee with, get to know.

Get to know your inner Republican. Dare to spank your inner child. Take an Id out for lunch. Don't judge your superego until you've run a marathon in its Nikes.

Is it true that democracy with the small d or a republican government with a small r are fated to produce bureaucracies? Are we all victims of inner bureaucracy? Who's in charge?

As my late father was wont to say whenever we parted company, cuand' arrive, scrive. Italian was not by any means his language, but in this case he'd come to like the sound and implication of those words. When you get there, write.

For these years, I have been sending post cards and Stick-it Notes from where I happen to be.

3 comments:

Kate Lord Brown said...

If only all fathers gave such good advice. When we were travelling I asked my pilot whether it would be strange to send postcards to our home address (he thought so, and he thinks the same of my recent interest in blogging). But then perhaps blog posts are the contemporary equivalent of postcards - lyrical notes from where we are now?

Anonymous said...

I don't know where they all come from but I am trying to write them all down.

Anonymous said...

Going through your old stories, your pocket-worn Moleskines, reviews you wrote on books you have long since forgotten you'd read in the first place, you come across sentences, sometimes even paragraphs that make you wonder, what stranger found my notes and old stories and now wants to mess with my head by setting in this material, this wisdom I did not know I had, this love of existence I did not know resided within me.