February 15, 2016
The other day I asked my self, ‘who am I?’ and my self replied: “Why you are me, and I am me.” “How can I be you and you be me, are we not one?” I asked.
“No,” my self said. “The I and me ‘we’ are is never one; ‘we’ is a multitude of ‘I’ and ‘me’.”
“If ‘we’ is never one, then is there a ‘true’ self?” I asked my self.
“Yes,” said my self to I, “the ‘true’ self is the self I present in its multiplicity.”
“How can I present my ‘true’ self if I do not know who I am? Don’t I risk betraying my self with a lie about who my ‘true’ self is?” I asked my self.
My self, growing weary of this ageold discourse, sighed “I never betrays my self by an telling an honest lie of who I am.”
“An honest lie does not betray, how can this be?” I asked my self. By this point we were no longer just the two of us, me had arrived to join the discussion I was having with my self.
“I know who I am,” said me. “I am me,” said me.
“How can me know who I am, and know that I am me?” I asked myself.
“Let me ask you this” my self said. “When you go into your studio to make a self portrait, who is it that you see in your mirror?”
“Why, I see me,” I replied to my self.
“And who is it that you see in the self portrait once you have finished it,” my self asked.
“It is I,” I said.
“But what happened to me who you saw in the mirror,” my self asked?
“Don’t you see, it is me, my self and I you are seeing when you look in your mirror, when you are making your self portrait,” my self said.
“Even when you don’t know who I am, when you make a portrait of me, you are portraying your true self because that portrait contains more than me, it contains my self and I, too,” me said to I.
“As long as you portray all of us, the lies you tell will be honest. But if you refuse to acknowledge I am more than I am, you’ll betray who we are, your true self,” my self said to me and I.
“Why does I want to know these things, ‘who I am’?” asks my self.
“Haven’t all artists and philosophers since the beginning of human existence asked this same question?” I respond.
“By asking this question are you seeking your identity, ‘who I am’, in these same ranks?” my self asks.
“Perhaps”, I said, “if I am not here, then maybe it is me or myself who is there.” “It is the truth and where it finds me that interests me,” me interjects.
“Then together we will search for the answers to these questions, who I am, where and what the truth of me, my self and I resides,” I said to me and myself.