A FEW NOTES ON I

I, dear reader, have a confession to make. It relates to something you may already suspect, but I feel it is perhaps time to get this out in the open. I, the narrator that is, am a fiction. No, not entirely so, as in being completely non-existent, but certainly I cannot be said to exist. But, I must admit, I am something of an invention, though the identity of the inventor, I must say, is equally problematic; since I cannot but help speak here for that inventor.

Thus, you see the problem I am facing – though I chuckle to myself a little at this phrase, at this I that I keep claiming for myself, at the thought of actually coming face-to-face with anything. But, then again, I cannot help but claim to be an I; it is, perhaps, all that I have.

To borrow once again from dear Virginia “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.” And similarly I implore you, dear reader, to be cautious around me. Do not treat me as nobody, for I am far from that, but be ever vigilant in your awareness that I, too, have “no real being.”

At times – here comes the Woolf again – “Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them, it is for you to seek out this truth…” I – and perhaps this is both I the narrator and I the author this time – wish that dear Dr. S were here with her long-studied expertise in the field of the auto/biographical. I am sure she would have ready at hand any number of illuminating comments on the subject. Or, if the wife were readily available she might offer further insight on the relationship of author to narrator to character when all three are purportedly invested in a singular personage.

But, alas dear reader, you are left with me, that dubious I, to justify my presence here, to explain my relationship to this word I use so readily: I. I find it difficult to inform you precisely as to who I am, of what exact admixture of person and personification comes together to establish me, that is I.

Perhaps, though, I can offer a modicum of insight into what I am not. First off, I am not me, by which I mean him, that author writing through me, or of me, or perhaps just writing me. I am not not him, but he, most certainly is not me.

Unlike good old Ralph Waldo, I am not nothing; I do not see all; the currents of Universal Being do not circulate through me; I am neither part nor particle of God. Whatever it is that I may be, in this oblique state of being that I may be considered to possess, I most certainly have never imagined myself a “transparent eye-ball.” It is impossible that I could ever transcend my role as narrator; it is what I am written to be. I am not Being itself, but a variable vehicle for ideas that are other than me, though, unlike dear Ralph Waldo, there is nothing transparent about me; I am resolutely opaque.

But, dear reader, there are every so many things that I am not, most specifically, in that I am not, I am not, in fact, the author himself. I would not know, nor could I properly conceive of, how I would even begin such a project as being my own author, if such a thing could ever be done.

I am that which is written, for one purpose or another, but I am never, as far as I can tell, ever transparently me, by which I mean him. Or, more accurately, the I that I am is never, and never can be, the selfsame self as he that is writing this me. I am sure there is a nearly endless array of configurations of I, me, he, and us that I could be written into bringing forth, but I imagine – is this an imagined imagining? – that you have, by now, gathered my meaning. Thus, I invite you to continue reading me, as you have assumedly done before, and to know that you are quite definitely reading me, though never quite reading of me.


Note: According to One Letter Words: A Dictionary, it has been “reported that the less one uses the first-person pronoun, the less one’s risk of coronary heart disease.” I find this rather distressing since, in this space, I am little more than I, and cannot but refer to myself as such.