Soundless Selves.
Let's sit down and talk. Talking is at the crux of it. Wasn't it Mellarme who said that thinking is like music without instruments? Well let's play music then. Tune in your head to mine, soundless of course, and with our verbose silences make harmonies.
First I'll talk about honesty. For a friend asked me why I did not feel honest. It comes down to a form of evolution. For all your life, your voice is a mental companion. Imagine your head without a voice. For it's your voice you chat to constantly. It is a friend in your brain, an abstract mysterious relative that is neither connected by blood nor flesh but by, 'electrical impulses.' In fact, it is a companion to my fingers at this moment since it translates certain things that I feel. Do I believe in the duality between brain and body? Not particularly. Yet we're made up of so many different elements, to call ourselves self is strange. We are selves and we are our. Plurals. Worlds. Codes. Electricity. The main parts to our selves are invisible: feelings, thoughts, names, senses. You might even say we are invisible. It is only by coincidence we can see each other. To test this, we can do a very simple experiment. Close your eyes. Do you still remain you? If so, why do you remain you? Because your voice says, "I am still here. I still exist." What makes me me cannot be seen.
Anyway, I'm digressing. Evolution. Possibly the most important element of self is the word. Word is everything. Word names, word comprehends, word articulates. Words are our souls. There is body, then there are words. As we develop and grow, so does our use of words. As we trundle from one stage to the next, our inner tones and thoughts are shaped and shape what we see and experience. While feelings may often trigger words, it is our silent-voice-companion that turns what may just be a weird feeling in the stomach to sadness or a leap in the throat to anxiety. It also let's us differentiate between a stomach ache and sadness. So like Pullman's daemons, while our inner voice may keep developing and changing when we're young, the older we get, the more it returns to one frame of voice. Now it doesn't settle as permanently as daemons -- it is possible to change, it's possible to evoke a sense of superficial difference, since our physical feelings are often more mysterious than the non-physical, but it does begin to settle.
The idea of settling is a frightening one, one that's caused me to revile and recoil. And my voice was settling. My journal voice was settling. I used to write in my journals obsessively, awfully, boringly, maddeningly-- every impulse would form itself into a natural fruit of angst or pleasure or madness. Yet I was in touch with that vein of emotion, that self-absorbed conviction that this was the genuine, the truth. Then it began to settle. I borrowed other people's conventions, structures that didn't please me entirely but were easier to write; I borrowed voices from the verbal washing lines of others, ironing the creases from my sentences to keep them in line with formal occasions.
It was all very innocent of course until I began speaking words that weren't mine, I adopted a tone that was restrained and sported a parrot's throat. I began to develop a style of writing that wasn't suited to me, that lost all energy, that was second hand and empty. To my horror, I was beginning to sound like a box of folded up socks. Don't laugh. Well do, if you want. Yet there was such uniformity and simplicity and order: what did it all mean? It was harder and harder to express any emotion without using the surface voice.
The surface voice belongs to check out girl voice and speaking to elders voice. It made too much sense. And I became disconnected from that mysterious, invisible, internal freedom. Now my voice is your voice. In your head. You are me. I own you even if it's just for five seconds.
Yes, yes, I am weird and I don't plan on sleeping tonight.
First I'll talk about honesty. For a friend asked me why I did not feel honest. It comes down to a form of evolution. For all your life, your voice is a mental companion. Imagine your head without a voice. For it's your voice you chat to constantly. It is a friend in your brain, an abstract mysterious relative that is neither connected by blood nor flesh but by, 'electrical impulses.' In fact, it is a companion to my fingers at this moment since it translates certain things that I feel. Do I believe in the duality between brain and body? Not particularly. Yet we're made up of so many different elements, to call ourselves self is strange. We are selves and we are our. Plurals. Worlds. Codes. Electricity. The main parts to our selves are invisible: feelings, thoughts, names, senses. You might even say we are invisible. It is only by coincidence we can see each other. To test this, we can do a very simple experiment. Close your eyes. Do you still remain you? If so, why do you remain you? Because your voice says, "I am still here. I still exist." What makes me me cannot be seen.
Anyway, I'm digressing. Evolution. Possibly the most important element of self is the word. Word is everything. Word names, word comprehends, word articulates. Words are our souls. There is body, then there are words. As we develop and grow, so does our use of words. As we trundle from one stage to the next, our inner tones and thoughts are shaped and shape what we see and experience. While feelings may often trigger words, it is our silent-voice-companion that turns what may just be a weird feeling in the stomach to sadness or a leap in the throat to anxiety. It also let's us differentiate between a stomach ache and sadness. So like Pullman's daemons, while our inner voice may keep developing and changing when we're young, the older we get, the more it returns to one frame of voice. Now it doesn't settle as permanently as daemons -- it is possible to change, it's possible to evoke a sense of superficial difference, since our physical feelings are often more mysterious than the non-physical, but it does begin to settle.
The idea of settling is a frightening one, one that's caused me to revile and recoil. And my voice was settling. My journal voice was settling. I used to write in my journals obsessively, awfully, boringly, maddeningly-- every impulse would form itself into a natural fruit of angst or pleasure or madness. Yet I was in touch with that vein of emotion, that self-absorbed conviction that this was the genuine, the truth. Then it began to settle. I borrowed other people's conventions, structures that didn't please me entirely but were easier to write; I borrowed voices from the verbal washing lines of others, ironing the creases from my sentences to keep them in line with formal occasions.
It was all very innocent of course until I began speaking words that weren't mine, I adopted a tone that was restrained and sported a parrot's throat. I began to develop a style of writing that wasn't suited to me, that lost all energy, that was second hand and empty. To my horror, I was beginning to sound like a box of folded up socks. Don't laugh. Well do, if you want. Yet there was such uniformity and simplicity and order: what did it all mean? It was harder and harder to express any emotion without using the surface voice.
The surface voice belongs to check out girl voice and speaking to elders voice. It made too much sense. And I became disconnected from that mysterious, invisible, internal freedom. Now my voice is your voice. In your head. You are me. I own you even if it's just for five seconds.
Yes, yes, I am weird and I don't plan on sleeping tonight.