Archive for the ‘self’ tag
The Artificial “I”
(From my upcoming book Narrative Madness, edited by Katie Fox. Look for it soon on an iPad, Kindle or Amazon near you!)
All names are fictions, including the one that is closest to myself, that intimate name of names, my name for myself. For even the precious word “I” — which rises like a monolith above our heads, promising singularity and unity — is an invented word, rather than a natural concept.
“I” is not a person. “I” is a letter. “I” is a word. Letters and words carry with them traces of their history in the shapes of the letters, tracks that lead back in time. Our letter comes from the Egyptian pictogram of an arm with a hand, which stood for the long A-sound, later incorporated in the proto-Semitic language because their word for arm started with that sound (as ours does), which we can read to mean that “I” is that one that uses the arm to do things; I is the one who acts.
A derivation of the letter can be found in most Semitic alphabets. The letter Yud – Yodh, Yod, Ye or Jodh – can be found as the tenth letter in most Semitic alphabets, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Persian and Arabic. In Hebrew, two Yuds in a row represent Adonai, a name of God. Mystical significance is attached to the name because it is formed by the smallest letter. So no matter how small I am, I still have mystical power. The Phoenicians wrote the symbol diagonally, like a backwards drunken F. The Greeks righted the symbol and turned it into a solid, stable Doric column, the symbol we recognize today. The Greek letter is used in the English expression, “not one iota,” from a clause in the New Testament: “until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law” (Mathew 5:18), so “i” has been associated with exactness. (Information gleaned from Wikipedia).
I am the One the Writer of This Sentence is Referring to
Who is I? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “I” is “used by the speaker or writer to refer to himself or herself.” Simple enough, but let’s think this out. The dictionary says that “I” is “used by the speaker or writer,” implying that “I” and “the speaker or writer” are not the same. How can this be? Well, one is a word and the other is a person. That “I” appears in the dictionary proves that “I” is a written or spoken symbol. Okay, so? The problem is that we confuse ourselves with that symbol. I think I am the “I.”
