On Knowing Oneself
Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, man can shed seventy times seven and still not be able to say: ‘this is really you, this is no longer slough.’ In addition, it is a painful and dangerous mission to tunnel into oneself and make a forced descent into the shaft of one's being by the nearest path. Doing so can easily cause damage that no physician can heal.
Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”
I have become fascinated, it seems, with myself. It is not really in a narcissistic way—it is not like an infatuation—but it definitely feels solipsistic, as though I am something that could be studied and known comprehensively. In truth, I feel almost haunted by myself. It is a fascination like one has with the supernatural or otherworldly, a latent curiosity that finds you unexpectedly and is reluctant to leave, mostly because it can never be thoroughly satisfied. I am not alone in this feeling: Breton opens Nadja by asking, “Who am I?” In trying to answer, he immediately begins to meditate on the idea of “haunting,” and conjures up his “image of the ‘ghost,’” fearing that “[his] life is nothing but an image of this kind.” To haunt, he says, “makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.”
Thus, it becomes a morbid curiosity, too, like the kind one has regarding the past, and especially regarding awful tragedies that seem incomprehensible to the human psyche. It is that perverse temptation to disturb the psyche that seems to drive my fascination. I want to study my past: I reread, almost obsessively, old journal entries, bits of writing I have scattered throughout my laptop, emails; I log onto Instagram—deleted from my phone—on a computer browser, only to look at old photos, old stories, old posts on old friends’ pages from back when we knew each other well; I put on music that deeply affected me in high school and listen, very quietly; I revisit resolution lists of new years past, not to see if I have accomplished what I had hoped to, but to understand what it was I had once wanted to accomplish; I type my name into Google, never expecting anything new to come up; I find pictures of a younger self and compare them to the self in the mirror. I am searching for something I know I can never recover because I cannot even articulate what it is. I complete these activities carefully and attentively, cautious not to pass over any clues that could lead me to whatever it is I hope to find. I am searching in the sad and futile way one might rewatch a film that left them scarred or upset, as though this time the ending might change, or at least some hint of compassion that was missed during the previous watch might reveal itself, some moment of resolution to cling to. Resolution does not come; the search becomes compulsive and passionate.
Yes, I am searching for something; I want to see myself the way only a stranger can, and so I look to the version of myself rendered strange by the fissure left by time: the past self, the dead self. It is more than that, too: I want to recover all the forgotten knowledge, the lost wisdom I may have had then and was unable to understand at the time. Things I knew that have been washed away from lack of use. And still, I feel I am looking for more. Initially, I thought I was searching for some small part of me that got left behind during the relentless passage of time. But it is exactly the opposite: I want to know my essence—the small part of me that holds even after time has eroded everything on the surface. What does it mean to be me? What is it at my core that I can look back and know that the me in those old photographs is the same me in the mirror now? When all else changes, as it must—when my hair is different, when my friends are new, when my face matures, when my interests develop—what is it that remains? Maybe, if I line up all these things—the childhood photos, my old poorly-written poems, every book that I have declared “changed my life,” the songs I sang at fifteen, that photograph I took of my house with a cardboard box camera built for a sixth grade science project, my journals, my social media pages, the notebook I keep of new and favorite words—maybe if I study these things all together, I’ll find some clue as to who I am, who I have been. At least, this is what Nietzsche advises: “Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self.” I am trying; I am not yet convinced he was correct. Still, I study—compulsively, furiously, attentively.
Elizabeth Hardwick begins her not-quite-novel-not-quite-memoir Sleepless Nights with this dilemma: "If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself.” To this end, I record my life, my day-to-day, just in case I may look back on it some day in the future and in my words my heart will reveal itself to me. I treat Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” like scripture: “I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not[…]. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Virginia Woolf, too: “I should like it [a diary] to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection has sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mold, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life[…].” I am desperate to know myself—no, to maintain myself. To at least know what it is I maintain. The intent is that if I record thought and feeling—no matter how fleeting—, save any tangible evidence of my having lived, I will never need to worry about what must be remembered; it will all be there when I need it. Even the most seemingly mundane event can be materially conjured via some receipt stuffed between the pages of my journal.
Somehow, in all this writing—likely out of embarrassment—I have failed to mention my strange and semi-obsessive habit of “finding myself” on the street upon which once stood the hospital I was born in; a habit which developed on breaks home from college. When I have nothing to do, I take the train into Manhattan with the intention of walking aimlessly: almost always I find myself on that Greenwich Village corner, West Eleventh and Seventh Avenue. My frequent journeys to that site—which, apart from the AIDS memorial across the street, is fairly inconspicuous as a former hospital—are totally ridiculous and entirely unfruitful. Once there I gaze at the building, unsure of what to do with it. I feel ashamed for having returned: what clues could I possibly have hoped to find here? The hospital closed when I was seven or eight; I don’t even remember what it once looked like. And yet there I am, returning: summer, fall, winter, spring. It is akin to when enthusiasts of an author or musician travel to certain locations, sometimes of little relevance, just because their object of enthusiasm has some obscure connection to the place. Sniffing, like desperate bloodhounds, for some hint of life left behind, anything that’ll add to the portrait of their beloved one, even if it is just the experience of maybe having stood in the same spot for a fraction of a second, decades apart. It is exactly like that—only I am both the fan and the idol (I must clarify: in comparing myself to the celebrity, it is not an act of adoration but an act of alienation), and I am quite certain there is absolutely nothing I can get out of my trips. Still I return; still I search.
It is certainly not that I am experiencing a loss or confusion of identity; although perhaps it is just that I fear this so overwhelmingly, paramount to all other fears, that I cling so desperately to any indication of self I can touch. I feared so ferociously, in childhood and in adolescence, that there was some irremovable part of me that would inevitably lead me into an irreversible and lifelong craziness. Maybe out of this oppressive dread, my urge to recall, revisit, and remind myself of who I am was borne. Didion’s diagnosis, which I must affirm: “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Maybe my hope is that out of habit, muscle memory, I will still find myself on the corner of West Eleventh and Seventh Avenue, even when I have no recollection of what was once there or my relation to it. That is to say, if I can recognize my face the way one recognizes an old friend, my face won’t seem so unfamiliar when I fail to recognize it as my own.
Feb—March 2024