The persistence of selfhood

“You don’t know what you think until you speak.”

This is the motto of thousands—perhaps millions—of bloggers, and I’m proud to be in that number—O when the Saints come marching in!

And there is more to blogging than blogging. Oh yes. Scattered across the uncharted wastes of cyberspace—but let me not insult Google, probably charted quite thoroughly—our extempore comments lie wanton and unremembered: pigeons loosed but never coming home to roost for they are not of the homing variety. Or they are seeds broadcast, which engender new life in many a foreign field.

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever—blog comments!
[With apologies to Rupert Brooke, prophetic poet of the Great War 1914-18]

Anyhow, it was in such a comment—or now I think on’t, an email to a dear and faithful blogger, that I discovered my own thought: that this blog is about miracles, not miseries; magic and not mud; angelic sparkles and phosphorescence and not—mere stuff. On a good day.

But sometimes you know what you think without getting the opportunity to say it, perhaps without ever finding the words to wrap around it whilst retaining the imprint on their fabric of the thing they are wrapping round. There are especially fruitful times, for example lying still under a delicious quilt at three in the morning, not sure if one is awake—when the harvesting of that fruit would break the spell, so the inspirations must perforce flow back to their source till another time. I think it was in one of those sessions the other night, or it might have been whilst walking the mean streets near my house (and they have never seemed so mean as recently) that I caught the tail of a thought before it slipped my grasp and fled. Actually I remember now. I was striding past some premises with large windows, translucent but not transparent, the kind that it’s handy to catch a glance at yourself in, if you want to check your hair, or in my case if you suspect you are walking with one shoulder higher, something I’ve been accused of since standing to attention on parade aged thirteen. So when I glanced the other day, I saw the same person that I have known since I stopped growing. That’s the advantage of seeing oneself “through a glass, darkly” from a distance.

It was just then that I became aware of a particular miracle, and it seemed the greatest of all miracles: that I am still the “me” that I’ve always been, as far back as I can remember. I remember posing for a studio portrait in the summer of ’45: it has the date pencilled on the back of the photo. But—this is vitally important—I don’t want to talk about external looks. They change radically, laughably, perhaps weepably. Our persistent experience of “me” over the decades and half-centuries is the experience of ourselves from the inside. And surely my me is just like your me.

“The personal is the universal”. That’s a thought which popped out in another blogging free-for-all. Someone else said it first, then I seized on the thought. If I can get personal enough, rinsing out the circumstantial colour of my own idiosyncrasy till the bleached existential form is revealed, then I shall have contributed to the universal understanding of the universe by itself.

“I am still me.” If this were understood truly, then our institutions would subtly change: our education systems, courts, punishments. I have just started reading Crime and Punishment . This is from the Introduction: “Above all, the portrayal of Raskolnikov’s character [see portrait above] concerns the theme and problem of personality. What is under threat from ... [various -isms] is the image of the human self, and its potential for change and transformation.” You may call it a paradox, but let me claim it as one of those miracles from which the fabric of space-time is woven. The possibility of transformation sits on the base reality of “I am still me”.

And at this moment I am unable to make it clearer than that.