The Self As A Narrative

The last line of science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy’s The Man Who Wasn’t There reads, “The malady is the self.”

Philosopher Daniel Dennett views the self as “a fiction, posited in order to unify and make sense of an otherwise baffling complex collection of actions, utterances, fidgets, complaints, promises, and so forth, that make up a person.”

Anil Ananthaswamy:  “At its most complex, the self is a narrative — a personal, social and cultural narrative. And just like the bodily self needs to maintain an anatomical and physiological integrity, the narrative self, it seems, needs to have a conceptual integrity. The story that one is needs to be coherent. We start becoming a narrative as soon as episodes in our lives become memories, whether they are consciously accessible, or embodied: The more emotionally salient these episodes, the greater their impact on our narrative.”

“And because of the narrative self’s need for coherence, whatever the narrative is at any given stage of one’s life, it ‘constrains what the self is, has been, and can be,’ according to psychologist Martin Conway of City University, London. …The narrative self is influenced by emotionally significant events in one’s life, and this self — or the memories associated with these events — then influences what you do next, and so dictates how your narrative grows.”

The Last American Cowboy with his sidekick, Stubby

That might perhaps be mysterious babble,

psychogibberish but makes sense to me.

Last sixty years feel like a life

lived by somebody else.

Who was that guy?

And I can’t help wondering,

what the hell was that all about?

Then I get a letter from an old girlfriend.

And she writes, “I ran out of time

in this lifetime to find my way.

Spent a lot of time chasing what?”

Henry Miller said his life was his art.

And I think life is a story we tell ourselves,

and the world, one chapter at a time.

A play in many acts.

Life is a movie

and you are the star.

You pick the supporting cast.

Some of us spend a lifetime

finding our way to ourselves.

And I can’t help thinking

some of us spend a lot of time

chasing our own tails.

Which can be a lot of fun.

No doubt.

But in the end,

you are simply dizzy,

wondering

and wondering

what the hell happened.