We do not always make choices we like. Our choices do not always gratify, though sometimes -- with the remoteness of time stretching us farther and farther away and making the consequences clearer -- we can appreciate the decision made. Other times, the ache of decisions is a weight. Or perhaps the weight of decision not made...though, in truth, a non-decision is its own kind of decision, if a passive one. Just as there is no innocent bystander, there is no virtuous suspension of subjectivity while bearing witness to our own lives. We are enmeshed, often painfully so. Even in memory. Especially in memory.
For "all consciousness is self-consciousness" as Kathleen Wider writes in her book on Sartre and consciousness as rooted in the body. Was this where my anguish churned the most? Was it precisely because I could not remove myself to see objective reality -- or indeed any reality -- that this uncalled-for-reflection was tormenting me? I know I wanted to. I wanted to see what they saw: those others who shared that moment with me and now were buried in time's sands. I wanted to understand why what struck me as one thing, struck them as another. People would say I am highly empathetic. I tried to see things from their side. I thought about where they were coming from, what each of us did and said, how it could be perceived...every angle I could think of, I looked into, through, around. But still my darned self blurred the view.
Walter Benjamin knew that memory can evict reality from the rooms of our reflection. In "A Berlin Chronicle," (in Reflections) he writes of his reminiscences of the various spaces of the city that still highlight his memory. With the goal of evoking the form and atmosphere of a city, it is not time with which he is concerned. Time is more properly the structure for an autobiography and here, "I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities." (28) Still, Benjamin appears and disappears from his perceptions of the city because they are just that -- his perceptions -- just as images "constantly detach themselves from things and determine our perception of them." (29) Early in the essay, he speaks of reflection a la Proust as a fan in whose folds one endlessly seeks the truth -- smaller and smaller one dissects as "these microcosms grow ever mightier." (6) Thus, the danger of any exercise of self-reflection lies in the request of memory itself, which is "the capacity for endless interpolations into what has been." (16) And how could this not be? I could not and can not look back with any other than my eyes and thereby into that past, I continually insert (and assert) my new self. Oh, muddy existence.
The use of the third person is an awkward exercise, but perhaps gets one closer to the removal of self from memory. Or does it? Patty tries this approach in her autobiography within the pages of Franzen's novel, Freedom. She uses no "I" and instead speaks only of 'the autobiographer' (her current self) and Patty (her remembered self). Yet, in her attempt at self-removal, her removal of her own eye ("I"), her memories repeat and reaffirm the same insistent labeling voices of those from the original moments: "She was notably Larger than everybody else, also Less Unusual, also measurably Dumber" (29) Patty writes in the second paragraph of the first chapter of her autobiography. She not only recalls the insulting labels with which her family outcast her, they have become a capitalized aspect of her permanent self-definition. In doing so, she names herself as this specific entity (the definition of a capitalized proper noun) or maybe even attributes a Platonic (un)ideal to these qualities which she, once named, sought to embody. Plato's Beauty is changeless and eternal and so perhaps Patty's self-understanding as Less Unusual.
In writing of herself in the third person, Patty succeeds in recalling more than reflecting. "Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore." (50) She does recognize a different person in the past, but she also describes rather than reflects upon this person attempting to fulfill the desires of her family for herself in any way possible, however extreme. And, it seems, she does little more than recall this frustrated person whose later 'freedoms' may have been illusory. Perhaps because the exercise in self-reflection was requested by her therapist, there is a resistance to introspection that brings new insight. What is undeniable about the autobiography is Patty's sarcasm. Her chapters are titled tongue-in-cheek names like "Agreeable" and "Best Friends" to describe chapters respectively about a rape she was forced by her parents not to prosecute and a mentally unstable friend who stalked her. Her third person usage and her sarcasm appear as both detachment and narcissism. For, we do not really see Patty 'interpolating' her current self into her past or even extrapolating her past self into her present. It is all anger and bitterness and in the waves of witty sarcasm, everything drowns except for Patty's passive-aggressive resentment and her ongoing vulnerability. "Sarcastic people protect themselves by only letting the world see a superficial part of who they are," therapist Steven Stosny is quoted as saying in Psychology Today. Indeed, the Greek origin of the word sarcasm is 'sarkazein' whose literal definition is 'to strip off the flesh.' If Patty is stripping off her own flesh, the interior at which she arrives most nakedly is the self she defined in contradistinction to the dumb, large girl she did not want to be -- negative space with no real freedom in sight.
Personally, I realized that I needed to know why I was reflecting. What was my purpose? Without one, it would be an exercise in futility. Was it to heal past wounds, to measure my growth, to forgive my past self, or to see the past with new eyes? All of the above, I think. Though the more I sunk into reflection, the more I felt my goal was to speak to that past self: to tell her of consequences, of personal changes, of things lost. I wanted to save her from herself. And so, to step through my own looking-glass, I would break through the hindrance of my current self-reflection and maybe find a world flipped inside-out. But the fragments I would find would all be dead and gone, inert and inanimate, everyone real having moved on, my present self greeting that past self as Michelangelo's face on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew hanging from the altar in the Sistine Chapel.
I cannot find her. I cannot save her. She is not really even lost, but the pain is there. I need to make choices, not all of which should depend on her healing. There must be a balance. Scientists have found that people who reflect upon their decisions have more gray matter in their anterior prefrontal cortex. And yet...the same researchers have found that those who delve too deeply into themselves are prone to depression and, in fact, possess poorer memories. Memory is already such a poor tool. Most of my current choices should depend on the me I have become in the meantime. For too much time in our own memory may diminish our ability to function in the world. As Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park, "There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences."
I can recall a me and a time when I was closest to my own soul. Suffering from an eating disorder and terribly unhappy, I simultaneously felt most intimate with my own soul and with the essence of a shared humanity. Everything weighted so heavily upon me, I was practically two-dimensional. Perhaps I was...as a person. The more my own body withered, the more fluid I was with my feelings, my thoughts, my memory. And yet, this very fluidity ironically deadened me. Though it was as if I could experience emotions, for example, the most strongly, I also recall the difficulty I found in anything bringing me to tears. And now, now that I am a mother and, indeed, a most physical being, I cry most easily -- at a moving documentary or when my son puckers his lips and invites me closer with "Kiss, Mama." And so I wonder if some healthy separation from my own interiority, from the interiority of the world, in fact makes me a more empathetic, loving, and generous person in the present.
And so I will look back...and look back without fear...and then take off the veil. And I will hope to step forward with something learned, something understood while dropping the weight of the mirror. Not all reflection is a curse; it is also our singular gift to see with our own unique eyes and to share in the joy that we cannot understand anything as an individual. And that we cannot quite see as anyone else either. Perhaps therein lies the incomprehensibility of the infinite universe and the smallest microcosm.
I love you
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