It was over a year ago that I fell off a ladder and it took much too long to get over - and there are still residual problems knocking. But when I look back at this picture (taken in Arezzo, a sculpture of a man painting a building with no visible means of support) I got to thinking about other things, like what really does support us though life? I recently read William James' suggestion of a
convenient dissection of what is known as 'the self'. James suggests there is a
division between the conscious awareness contained in the pronoun “I” and the
autobiographical memories and stored experiences of “me” that constitute the
basis of who we are. Therefore in a blog like this it is easy to consciously transmit
a version of the “I” I want to give for public consumption, without it actually
being the real “me” - poets, politicians and celebrities do this all the time. And actually this is not just the artifice of the writer/performer etc, it also comes down to your reading of that
which we have written/presented and so on. In fact our entire
facebookery, twittering culture dictates this more and more, we present to the world an "I" we want the world to see. Look how smart, funny, cute, normal, wacky I am but does it really present an entire picture of "me"? Well it can't really because that "me" is also constantly shifting. Having decided to read this you
are already reading me into the “I” persona you imagine I am through the
writing I do and in addition to the other things you know about me. This is normal of course, we present ourselves as we would like others to see us and see others in the world in relation
to ourselves, it is where empathy, love, dislike etc comes from. If you were to
say you don’t like me, it is because you see the “I” figure in relation to
yourself and what you really don’t like is the public face you can see without
ever knowing the private. Bruce Hood calls it "the phenomenological experience of a stream of conscious awareness, a
sense of coherent identity and our belief that we have free will to make
decisions and act... However, our self is the resultant interaction between our inherited biology and our experiences." For example, if you had no knowledge of me (experience) how would you know you didn't like me? Of course a part of me can already assume I hear you asking, 'what is he on about...' I have been wondering that myself because, you see, I am trying to write a paper about biography and self-experience, and poetry and songwriting and the position the 'self' occupies in lyrical narrative; and I am trying to understand the ideas that keep coming back through images that have been stretched, re-arranged and refracted by time and ongoing experience - if that makes any sense - thus, I am painting a building while standing in mid air...
