It’s submerged in nearly every sentence, diphthong without which it’s hard to go for long (ask the Oulipo). It, a tic, a blip, a spear to pierce the Good Year blimp, an exclamation point without a dot, you can’t avoid an I. Those Is, somehow American, manic, upright, gaze at the everything around us, always thinking, being, wanting to find their way to something biggie-sized and tasty, always gerund, processing, grinding up an us into component bits of light, but at the bottom of the can of us there is just us.
The world is filled with them, jutting, jousting, rutting, roasting them on television cooking and other shows. Sometimes it’s easy to believe that without I there would be no world. Certainly there’d be no universe. The Internet is not the universe, though some days it seems like it; it is another space in which we can separate Is from bodies, let them erect themselves, let them do their thing.
I receives enigmatic sexts from senior citizens concerned about our eroding communications standards, our sagging breasts, the proliferation of poetry, and the increasing use of the emoticon and the word like, which is unstoppable, but which I like. I may lament dropped apostrophes in e-mails, television ads, possessives repossessed by teens who think of everything as theirs, including memoir, including technology, the world’s best worlds, including individual experiences that may seem idiosyncratic but are not.
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What makes an I? What makes us display our Is? Why can we sometimes not believe our eyes? And what good are eyes, are Is, if we can’t believe them? Is the self an atom, indivisible without catastrophe? Or a conglomeration of unlike parts, a rebuilt Hardy Boys jalopy? (The Hardy Boys novels were not written by an I—their “author,” Franklin W. Dixon, like Carolyn Keene of the Nancy Drew series and plenty of other “writers,” is a construct, a convenience, a conglomeration of nameless, ill-paid ghosts.) Is I a bunch of flowered turn-ons, measurements, and pet peeves? Is it a wiki? A palimpsest? A set of sexy Russian nesting dolls?
Obviously we believe in I. We have to believe in I. We decide to believe in I in this culture. But I can’t shake the feeling that I is only a shared and useful assumption.
And well, yes, part of my interest in memoirs, in YouTube, in personae, in the public display of I is because I envy them, unrepentant, unashamed displaying themselves—live! nude! girls!, real! wild! hot! authentic! living! unexamined! life!—for you.
I can’t imagine a life in which I was un-self-conscious enough to try to tell my story unmediated. I’ve tried to be a good Midwesterner raised sort of Protestant (which is to say Protestant) and filled enough with shame (and therefore its opposite, pride and its accompanying exhibitionism, that sudden panty flash that taboo zest that rush of yes and more than yes) that I just cannot imagine myself into that kind of consciousness at all. Lacking self-consciousness is a big part of what separates the celebrity from the noncelebrity, studies show.
Like any other neurotic I become necrotic with time. The half-life of I is such that it decays into dandruff serif flakes, skin cells, yesterday’s brains, who we used to think we’d be.
Photo: Chad K via Flickr
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