When I first awaken, there is no interiority to speak of. No inner world or inner space. And certainly no sense that I exist as an “I” peering out through emotional, physical, or intellectual peepholes of consciousness. In those first waking moments, I am not yet a subjective “here” orienting myself through objective “theres.” In this primitive, blinkless dawn, I have yet to reconstruct and recombobulate myself. I am not yet the “I” that I will again become. While there is no inner point that I can dub “me,” nor is there yet any sense of external space, of what is “not me.” For this timeless moment, all is suspended, unanchored, unchosen, unnamed. There is only the thinnest glimmer of awareness, stretched out like an infinite sheet of mylar, the mirror-like fabric of space/time itself.
In the first gaping yawns of morning pre-consciousness, I do not yet even exist, nor do I need to. Why in god’s name, then, do I make the choice, again, to climb back into that same wobbly pilot’s seat, that rickety captain’s chair? Why willingly clothe myself in the stiff, moldy costume I was so eager to shed just last night? Why so quick to take up the trappings and tools of that habitual me? The thick-soled boots and canvas gloves. The knee pads and face shield. The scalpel and the microscope. So much armor, so many implements that I willingly press, strap, and prop into place. And not merely in preparation for the challenges of a new day, but to create my very self. To recreate myself into today’s version of me in fealty to some unspoken bargain I have, for the most part, been keeping for years: “Okay, sure. Yes. I will be her. Again.”
I am haunted by these words from poet Adrienne Rich. They have dogged me for decades, poking up from below like traffic spikes at the most unsuitable and surprising times: “I do not know who I was when I did those things.” Words that rumble through me, eliciting something like a sigh or a gasp. Not a noise “I” make, mind you, not “my” sound, but a sharp intake of breath that inserts itself, unbidden, unanticipated. And I feel the truth of it: I do not know who I was then. When I took that first baby step. When I stumbled on that stage. When I hid behind a book in the corner. When I won that prize. When I told those lies. When I reached for her hand. When, after years of suffering, I finally propelled myself to the surface, slick and giddy as a pearl diver.
The passage is longer: “I do not know who I was when I did those things, or who I said I was, or whether I willed to feel what I had read about, or who in fact was there with me, or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things.” The hypnotic stories I have taken up and made my own. The words and actions of my mother, my father, my ancestors. My third grade teacher. That dour professor. The asshole in the dive bar. The Tibetan monk with his saffron robes and gentle hands. The first woman I fell in love with, sitting between her legs as she braided my hair. So many narratives. I have copied them into my spiral notebook. Some I have carved into the soft flesh of my inner arm: “You are her. Be her. Be her. Be her.”
But it is not just these morning spates of not-knowing that sometimes leave me feeling bruised (like lips after hard kisses). Sometimes the whole psychological and philosophical scaffolding of it announces itself only as it comes crashing down. The real message then is revealed as being not especially personal. It’s not really about MY trajectory, whatever particular tales of torment or triumph I might weave into something new and stylish to wear on this morning. It is, rather, that the sheer fact that there can be “doubt about these things” is utterly astonishing. I am not, then, merely she who is continually recreated through the machinations of her own mind. I am (as you are) the alpha and omega behind the question of existence itself. In the glorious half-moment before I consent to be me, I am formless, pure, exuberant wonder.
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