No company, please, in the house of mirrors
Or: the pains/perils of writing about others (Part 1)
I’m all for navel-gazing. In literature and in life. Once upon a time, I wrote for an undergraduate arts and culture magazine (God bless ‘em, link here), so I’m familiar with the accusation. It’s used to dismiss an act of contemplation that is judged to be excessively self-interested — examining one’s own self at the expense of, well, everything else.
But sit with that idea for long enough and you’ll realize that it leaves out something important: namely, the question of what exactly we mean when we say “the self,” and how it relates to “everything else,” and at what point we draw the line to know the difference. This is no simple matter. In fact, given that one can only ever know things from the perch of one’s own self, it is, perhaps, the deepest question of all.
No surprise, then, that navel-gazing has a rich history as an esoteric contemplative practice. Hindu practitioners did it. So did the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Greeks called it omphaloskepsis; this was the preferred contemplative mode of the Monks of St. Athos, “who pretended or fancied that they experienced celestial joys when gazing on their umbilical region, in converse with the Deity.”1
The idea that I might discern the shape of the cosmos (or the divinity) in the whorls of my own belly button enormously complicates any distinction between belly button and cosmos, between me and not-me. But that’s all for the best, isn’t it? Because knowing the boundaries of my own self — drawing a line in the sand and saying: I end here! —isn’t ever the point. Not really. What I want to know is what responsibilities these boundaries entail. What I want, in other words, is nothing less than how to be a self in a world of other selves.
This is familiar terrain for an essay. In fact, it’s what the essay has always been about. Montaigne, who basically invented the form, called his texts attempts or assays (in French: essais), and although he never really specified what he was attempting/testing, the path he traces back and forth between his own judgment and inherited wisdom, between lived experience and metaphysical pondering, and between uncertainty and speculation (and thereby to a contingent, uniquely modern kind of knowing), suggests that the essays are less “about” any single thing than they are about the bounds of himself, and how to live within them.
On the days when I believe that art is “for” something, it is for this purpose. And while all kinds of art get at this tricky question of “the self” in one way or another, the type that does so most directly at the level of form is the meta-narrative: the story that narrates its own narration. The text that inspects its “textiness.”
A meta-narrative knows about itself. It is aware of its own artifice. In this sense, its defining characteristic is self-consciousness. Sontag pointed this out in her essay on Lionel Abel (which was about theater, but the general observations still stand):
It is the metaplay — plots that depict the self-dramatization of conscious characters, a theater whose leading metaphors state that life is a dream and the world a stage — which has occupied the dramatic imagination of the West to the same degree that the Greek dramatic imagination was occupied with tragedy.
In Greek tragedy, the characters do not know that they are characters. But the playwright does, and so does the audience. This creates a sort of God/mortal relationship between the viewers on the “outside” of the story and the characters on the “inside.”
In metatheater, (which arises, non-coincidentally I suppose, with the long slide into secular, ie. Godless modernity), this God/mortal relationship is confused. The characters on the “inside” know something is up. They know they are performing. They begin to sense the presence of an “outside” (for where else could the audience be sitting?). As Sontag writes: “Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as, but are, hero and king. But Hamlet and Henry V see themselves as acting parts.”
The really fun part about this muddling-up of the inside/outside of a narrative is that it goes both ways. If the “inside” of the narrative can be the “outside,” those of us (the writers, the readers) who thought ourselves comfortably on the outside begin to wonder: is the trick on us? Does the text before me contain me, somehow? Is it more real than I am? How can I be sure?
Once one starts thinking this way, it’s hard to stop, for several reasons. The first is that, as Sontag herself pointed out, the self-consciousness of metatheater corresponds to a real historical condition: it acknowledges, through literary form, that “modern man lives with an increasing burden of subjectivity, at the expense of his sense of the reality of the world.”
I certainly feel this. I suspect many of us feel it: the sense that what’s real is not quite verifiable, and that one could wander around in the wilderness of one’s experience without ever getting to that self-evident place called “the world.” In all likelihood, digital technologies have exacerbated this derealization, although Sontag was writing in the sixties, so it can’t be all TikTok’s fault.
This brings up the second reason that the meta-narrative can be so captivating: by having us suspect that we are on the “inside” of some simulation (an experience that affirms our feeling that the world is not quite real), it dangles before us the promise of getting to the outside — of standing outside of ourselves and looking in, and seeing everything clearly. Ie. the dream of perfect knowledge. This trades on the desperate hope that there may remain, at sufficient remove, a position of God-like omniscience where I can cross my arms and look in and chuckle at the mere mortals fretting vaguely about their screen-time and the sixty degree days in mid-February.
Sounds cool. But how do I get there?
I get there by writing (so goes the fantasy): if words on paper are the only thing I can really be sure of, and if they give the illusion of being capacious enough to encircle reality, then it follows that, to get past the confusion, I simply have to write something sufficiently self-aware. If I can fix the slippery creature of my own subjectivity to the page like some wriggly six-legged specimen with a pin through its thorax, I can step back and see things as they really are.
Let’s be clear: this is silly. It’s silly. Trying to get outside of myself means, in practice, running in circles and chasing my tail. Trying to achieve this through writing means crafting ever-more recursive and insufferable and disembodied texts: writing about writing about writing, an endless spinning wheel.
In other words, the promise of the metanarrative proves to be sort of a ruse. Rather than positioning me to produce a piece of writing that is, magically, the size of the world, it obliges me to constrain my conception of the world to the scale of words on a page. The result being an endlessly self-absorbed, excessively cerebral and all-around out of touch hombre.
I have been here before. In the summer of 2019, I thought I could escape the pain of my first major breakup in precisely this fashion — by writing my way out. This took the form of a single short story, over which I labored at the tiny desk of my West Harlem sublet, beside a window that overlooked a taupe brick wall and, if I pressed my face to the pane and looked up, the barest ribbon of sky. That months-long project was, ultimately, a deluded attempt to resolve on paper the feelings I felt in real life. It bit me in the ass. It still hurts to think about.
Maybe I’ll tell that story someday. But for present purposes, it suffices to say that, even now, I haven’t totally learned my lesson. I remain incurably inclined toward the self-referential, toward the promise that writing can contain itself (and maybe me as well), toward a systematic, garrulous omphaloskepsis.
Which is all fine and good, I guess. No harm done, if all this takes place in the privacy of my coiled-up psyche. But there is something that upsets this endless, recursive, self-spooling. It’s annoying, I know, but it must be acknowledged: the existence of other people.
All this is on my mind because of an essay I wrote last week, which I’ve pitched to the web edition of a pretty good magazine. You will not be surprised to learn that it is about writing (handwriting specifically) and its relation to questions of the self. But it is also, critically, about a friend of mine, whom I’ll call D. The essay is, in some ways, a letter of admiration for D. Its tone is of unqualified fondness.
But even so, when I sent off the first draft to her to see if she consented to my using her real name, I found myself in an utter fucking tizzy. Super anxious, emotionally fragile, etc. I haven’t yet heard back from D (this is characteristic of her), and although I’m feeling less freaked out, the intensity of this experience has got me wondering: why exactly was it so hard to share my writing about another person with that person?
I have a few ideas, which speak directly to the questions surfaced above. But this essay has metastasized to the point where, at 1500 words, I have only just begun to address the topic promised by the title. So I think I’ll treat this as Part 1 of who knows how many.
Because — and here’s the important thing — it seems to me that this question of how to write about others in the presence of others, how to make sense in relationship to the fundamental unknowability of other selves, and how to submit this attempt to the judgment of those selves, is a challenge that pulls one deeper into the messiness of the world, rather than leading one out of it. Writing tends to be a pretty solitary practice, but this kind of writing can activate our beholdenness to others; its primary constraint is not literary form or style, but the ties of trust and responsibility that entail us to other selves. Which is real! That’s fucking real! And I speak from experience when I say this is no easy task — it sets one up for all sorts of emotional sucker-punches (right in the navel!). But it is also, I reflect upon consideration, the only kind of work that seems at all worthwhile.
More soon.
-P
Curiosities of Medical Experience, J.G. Millingen (1839).