I forget myself

Self-awareness in Henry Jamison, Augustine, Ishiguro, and De Man

Dear Friends,

Warmest Saturday greetings to you all! I don’t know where this email finds you, but it finds me in a farm to table café, belly full of baked oatmeal and plum compote, with half a mug of coffee left to enjoy. It’s been not a busy week, not in terms of dates on the calendar, but being elbow deep in writing. I’ve been having that experience where, because my mind is occupied with one line of thought, every experience I have, song I listen to, book I read seems to converge on the same theme. This week that theme has been the connections between memory, autobiography, and the sense of self. Care to enter my meandering thought maze?

Last week, I wrote about shame. Shame is the painful realization that something you are doing is indecorous or indecent. Shame is founded on the ability to understand how your actions are experienced by others— and to care about it! In this way you could say that shame is a form of, if not self-knowledge, self-awareness. Awareness of self. What is a “self”? What is your self or my self? Often people who we would say are not self-aware have a very strong sense of themselves, sometimes at odds with how others describe them. This brings up many questions. Is the self something deep and impermeable inside of you? Or is it how others experience you? Or is it a melding of both? These questions merged and percolated as I edited my conversation this week with singer-songwriter Henry Jamison. It reminded me of one of my favorites of his songs:

The song feels to me like a short autobiography, and whenever I listen to this song, I think of Augustin’s Confessions. Henry speaks of growing up in one verse and of falling in love in another. The first he ends with “I can’t remember now/I forget myself” and the second “Oh I’m sorry I/I forget myself.” I have always read this as a lovely little play on words. In the one sense, he forgets the details of his falling in love, his growing up. And in forgetting them, he also forgets “himself.” Suggesting a connection between who he is, and what he remembers. So he sings:

Ooh, what if I remembered all the time
Would it go backwards?
Forwards?
Past as future?

What if we remembered all the time? We sometimes think of memory as a backward looking this, but as Henry artfully puts it in this simple song, memory pertains not only to the past but can throw us into the future. How we remember ourselves shapes who we think we are. It makes me think of a line from from the literary critic Paul De Man’s famous essay “Autobiography as Defacement”:

“We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life.

The stories we remember then are not some static thing, some box we reach into to pull out pictures to look at. To remember ourselves is an action we participate in, and something over which we exert narrative influence. Remembering does not merely account for myself, but in some meaningful way, shapes my sense of self.

It’s for this reason, I think, that I’ve always connected this song of Henry’s to the opening essay in Rowan Williams’ book On Augustine entitled “A Question to Myself: Time and Self-Awareness.” Augustine’s famous Confessions are an autobiography. Williams describes Augustine’s narration of his life as “‘a drift of sequences’: vivid episodes, lobated, reflected on interrupted by sudden, almost violent outbursts of philosophical bewilderment.” Augustine is not able to arrive at a coherent view of himself, and his openness to God continually upsets his own view of himself. As Williams puts it “Augustine’s originality lies in defining the self as incomplete.”

Perhaps the most poignant example of this is Augustine’s failure to love his best friend “humanly”: “he had loved another mortal as though that human other were both immortal and the necessary object that would complete his own selfhood. He had not taken into account the finite otherness of the world.” He had treated the friend as complete, as an unchanging object, necessary to his own happiness, rather than the fluctuating, changing, mortal being that he was. This brings me back to Kazuo Ishiguro’s crystalline little novel Klara and the Sun.

“Do you believe in the human heart? I don't mean simply the organ, obviously. I'm speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?” 

(spoiler alert: skip this paragraph if you wish to read Klara and the Sun spoiler free)