Tamara, this is exactly the theme you have a gift for choosing and then Museguiding far beyond the obvious. You take a familiar phrase and dismantle it until we realize we’ve been carrying around a metaphor that never made sense in the first place.
Attention may build a self, but it also edits one. We talk about what we look at, but rarely about what we no longer see. A photographer friend once told me that every photograph is an act of exclusion before it’s an act of inclusion. The frame matters because of everything left outside it. I think people are similar. At some point, I became convinced I was an impatient person. Then I noticed I’d been attending almost exclusively to deadlines, delays, queues, and inefficiencies for years. The evidence was overwhelming because I had curated it myself. The moment I started paying attention to moments that required patience, for instance a conversation with my grandfather, teaching a child to tie shoelaces, making a proper risotto, I discovered I was starving one version of myself and feeding another.
That’s why your Brâncuși metaphor is so perfect. We imagine identity as archaeology when it’s much closer to gardening. Nothing is buried waiting to be found. Things grow where attention is watered. Neglect is also a creative act.
And I laughed at the “facilitator of arrival”. If anyone ever introduces themselves to me that way, I’m immediately departing.
A beautiful essay, full of nuance, wit, and intellectual range. As usual, Tamara, you’ve taken a concept everyone thinks they understand and turned it a few degrees until an entirely different shape appears.
….. and the risotto is what gets me because you can't hurry one, the rice decides the pace, and standing there stirring is a tiny daily tutorial in not being the impatient person you'd cast yourself as. You found the counter-evidence in the saucepan. I love that the proof was that domestic (* especially because I’m incapable of doing it!).
Your photographer friend has handed me something fascinating , the exclusion before the inclusion. It means every self is also a vast unphotographed remainder, all the versions we framed out, still technically there, just never developed. The impatient you didn't vanish when you started watering patience. She's still in the contact sheet. Probably resurfaces in traffic. And the unsettling part of your gardening image is that gardens revert. Stop attending and the old growth, the bramble, the impatience, comes back hard, since neglect doesn't return you to neutral, it returns you to whatever's most vigorous and least chosen.
Depart immediately, yes! Anyone facilitating your arrival is mostly facilitating their invoice. Thank you for bringing the grandfather and the shoelaces into it, chère Céline! Specifics like that are worth more than agreement.
Imagine working 10 hours a day as a plumber for 20 years, but telling yourself in your mind that you're a surgeon because that's what you always wanted to be, and in your most delusional moments, still convince yourself that it's what you will pursue. At a dinner party, when a stranger asks you what you do, you would say that you're a plumber because to claim otherwise would be a lie at best, and insane at worst.
Seems obvious, except we tell this exact lie, and indulge this exact brand of delusion, whenever we talk about our identities; about "finding ourselves". The only difference is the abstraction of identity as a concept, which is so good at obfuscating the truth that we use it to soothe ourselves and to cope with uncertainty and disappointment.
And it is cope. To accept that it isn't who we are, but what we do that defines us, is to face the fact that our current state of dissatisfaction - and to be clear, we're all dissatisfied fundamentally despite what we tell ourselves and others - is in fact indistinguishable from who we are. It's not the totality of who you are, necessarily, but it is the culmination of all of your choices and experiences, combined with some impossibly encrypted genetic code.
The irony is that facing this devastating truth is the thing that might just be painful enough to get us to move, to change, to take steps to become the person we delude ourselves into thinking we are. But because the pleasure of a rehearsed dream often wins over the prospect of vacillating between the tedium and terror of real change, we book trips, buy consultations and consume products to find, not ourselves, but refuge from the pain of truly owning the sum total of our accrued calamities.
At least the plumber who calls himself a surgeon still shows up to the actual pipes. That's the part I keep turning over in your version. The hands know. The body files the 20 years correctly even while the mouth lies at the dinner table, and there's a strange mercy in that because it means the truth is already stored somewhere, waiting, whether or not we ever consult it.
But I would push on the dissatisfaction. I'm not sure it's the floor under all of us. Some people seem to have made peace with the pipes. Not delusion, not cope, just an actual settling, and I can never tell from the outside whether they've achieved something I haven't or simply stopped asking the question that keeps me up. The Marcus problem again. You only get the inside of one head.
And your last move is the cruel one, that the truth hurts enough to be useful. Pain as the only reliable engine. I half believe it. The other half has watched people sit inside a devastating clarity for years and not move an inch, narrating their own paralysis beautifully. Cioran built a career there.
Andrew, this was a little essay behaving as a comment. Thank you for spending it here instead of keeping it!
Magnificent. I love the inversion at its heart, perhaps we don't become what we seek, but what we repeatedly notice. It's rather like astronomy. The stars you chart determine the map you navigate by, even though the night sky contains infinitely more than you ever see. Attention is not a flashlight. attention is a cartographer. Every sustained gaze redraws the borders of the self.
And choosing Brâncuși was inspired. No artist better demonstrates that identity is not discovered in a single revelation but distilled through relentless refinement, each sculpture less an answer than another approximation. That is exactly what you achieve. Beautifully argued, intellectually generous, and written with the rare ability to make philosophy feel like lived experience rather than abstraction. Tamara, you never disappoint.
Ohhhh the cartographer image is better than anything I gave them, but I'd add the part that frightens me about old maps. They get inherited. Someone charts a coastline wrong, draws a sea serpent where the data ran out, and ships avoid that stretch of ocean for two centuries. We navigate by selves drawn long ago, by attentions we no longer even remember choosing, and most of us never sail back to check whether the monster was real. The map outlives the looking that made it. That's the trouble with distillation too, it's irreversible. You can't un-refine….
Lovely to be read by someone who reaches for the heavens to explain the inward, dear Clara! Thank you, truly!
Staying with the astronomy metaphor and Brancusi's modus operandi, they can be seen dovetaling together. In the contemporary star gazing Hubble telescope it takes over eleven continuous days aimed at the smallest sector of "empty" night sky to actually see the thousands of galaxies that are there. (Compare the duration of our eye which resets it's image every 0.1 seconds.)
So Brancusi and Van Gogh and especially Cezanne in their different themes and mediums, saw what is there only by stacking their dedicated attention on the same familiar spot on their horizon to reveal the deep image that depicts the anima mundi for the artist and the vast universe for the astronomer.
The Hubble figure is the keeper here, 11 days on a patch of nothing to let the faint stuff accumulate into galaxies. That's the exposure time the self never gets given anymore. We reset every 0.1 seconds and then refresh the feed on top of that, so the dim things, the slow-developing ones, never reach the plate. We shoot our own portrait at a shutter speed that guarantees blur and then wonder why nobody's home in the picture.
Cézanne is your sharpest example, actually! Same mountain, hundreds of times, Sainte-Victoire refusing to be finished. He was integrating the signal, like the telescope, like Brâncuși's birds. Attention as a long exposure.
Michael, thank you for the deep field, it gives the whole argument a literal photograph!
Tamara, how remarkable this essay is. You’ve taken an abstract cultural cliché, “finding yourself”, and dismantled it without becoming cynical. Instead of criticizing the idea, you replace it with a more rigorous and convincing model of personhood.
The comparison with Brâncuși is stupendous because it does more than provide an elegant metaphor. It reorganizes the entire argument. Your essay pivots on a crucial distinction, discovery versus construction. Brâncuși’s birds are not hidden truths extracted from matter but forms accumulated through sustained attention. By the time the comparison returns in the final pages, it no longer feels illustrative, it feels explanatory. The bird becomes a theory of identity.
I love the pragmatic insight that attention is a manufacturing process. We often speak as though our choices reveal who we are, when in practice our repeated attentions may be doing more of the work. The implication is unsettling, identity may be less a matter of values than of exposure. Show me what occupies your eyes for five years and I can make a better prediction about who you are becoming than if you hand me your list of principles.
The sharpest observation arrives, the self is being made whether we participate consciously or not. That turns selfhood from a philosophical puzzle into an allocation problem. The question is no longer “Who am I?” but “What am I feeding the machinery that produces me?” That reframing feels both contemporary and deeply ancient, which is why the references to James, Aurelius, Murdoch, and McGilchrist land so naturally.
Most essays about authenticity assume there is a buried essence waiting for excavation. This one suggests something far more demanding, there may be no treasure underground, only a workshop. And workshops require discipline, repetition, and attention rather than revelation. That is a much less romantic idea, and a much more useful one.
A superb piece of writing that manages to be intellectually ambitious without losing narrative charm. Like Brâncuși’s studio, it leaves us, the readers, with the suspicion that becoming is always more interesting than finding.
That’s excellent, the allocation problem…. it has a budget, and the brutal thing about attention is that the budget is fixed and shrinking and mostly already spent before we are awake enough to choose. So the discipline I keep praising is somehow a fiction. Most of what makes us got allocated by default, by where we happened to be born and what happened to be glowing nearby. The workshop has an owner, and for long stretches it isn't us, which is where I would complicate the prediction game. 5 years of someone's eyes will tell you a great deal, agreed, more than their principles. Except the eyes sometimes resist. A person can be soaked in something for a decade and curdle against it, define themselves by the refusal, and now the exposure predicts the opposite of what it fed in. The convert, the apostate, the kid raised on a thing who spends adulthood escaping it. Attention shapes, yes! It just doesn't always shape in the direction of the stimulus, and that small unruliness is maybe the only freedom left in the model.
You read it the way one reads when one is also a maker, watching the joinery and not just the surface, Alexander! Thank you for the time this clearly took!
Oh, this essay came out at a perfect timing……after a sleep full of dreams, that left me quite thinking. Being on the threshold of turning fifty, it’s unavoidable to ruminate on what may have been. How many decisions have been made that brought me to where I am now? What if? Many lives I thought were mine, only to be forgotten when I discovered new lives to be lived. Sometimes I think that my voracious curiosity is more a curse than a blessing: how can I be what I want to be if I get continuously swayed by the beauty in this world? But I lived long enough to know that I don’t have enough time left, so every decision on what to pay attention to has become more painful, because it means I need to mourn the rest. But isn’t this the way we create ourselves? Repeatedly deciding what deserves our finite attention, and accepting an identity built as much from the lives we relinquish as from the ones we pursue? I think so, but it’s painful: this is why I think some night a dream come back to haunt me: “Enzo, what made you think you were becoming wise?...ah, poor fool……”.
The mourning is the part nobody warns you about, Enzo. Every act of attention at 50 is also a small funeral for the 4 lives you didn't pick that morning. In your 20s the unchosen lives felt stored, deferred, collectable later. Now they're losses in real time, and the curiosity that once felt like abundance starts feeling like grief on a schedule. I don't think that's the curse you fear it is, though. The voracious are simply paying the cost more consciously. The incurious mourn nothing because they noticed nothing, and that's the worse bargain, an easy peace bought with a narrow life.
That dream-voice mocking your wisdom, I'd almost trust it. The fool who knows the question is still standing closer to wisdom than the man who stopped asking and called it arrival.
Thank you for bringing the dream and the threshold both! This is the comment of someone actually doing the work my essay only describes.
Oh yes! At 60 this is definitely my reality. I am surprised how long it took me to recognize that choosing one thing was excluding several others! Thank you for your honesty, Enzo.
“The search was the wrong idea from the start.” Call me Ishmael, but Captain Ahab knew this error as well as anyone. We want our select selves to be a white whale we can pin down, but it’s more like a well-peeled mango: the self is a really slippery business. It’s hard to hold for long. Sure, parts of us persist through time; ballet lines do come into focus first for a ballerina, grievance does define a divorced man that swims in his grievance, any white whale from our past or future gives some shape to that elusive sense of continuity. But the world is ever in motion. A self exists within that roiling reality. It must be perpetually updated to accommodate a shifting reality, which makes actually defining it terribly hazardous.
To seek it is folly. It unfolds as it exchanges tokens of its being with the larger environment, consuming this or that, accumulating and paring as feels most aligned with the momentum we are simply tracking. It does not exist as a place, a location, an isolated node within the web of life. History matters. Aspirations matter. Choices matter. But searching for a center is best described as grasping the mango too tightly. It will squirt away and splat on some surface where it must be recovered, only to slip away again if we are careless. Finding it is the wrong idea. Well said. Becoming it within Being is the only honest metaphor.
Ah ah ah…. so good, the mango earns its place against the whale, and here's why I think it actually beats Melville for your purposes. Ahab's whale is out there, separate, huntable, a thing with coordinates. The mango is in your own hand. You don’t chase it across an ocean, you lose it at the kitchen counter, which is the more honest predicament. The slipperiness is that the thing won't stay gripped even when you've got it, because gripping changes it, warms it, breaks the flesh. Attention does that too. The looking alters what's looked at, so the self you pin is already not the self that moved.
I would lean on your phrasing … "tokens of its being exchanged with the environment”. Yes! Though I'd say the environment now does more of the exchanging than we do. It pushes tokens at us faster than we select them. Ahab at least chose his whale, we mostly get assigned ours by whatever is the loudest in the water, and the discipline, the accumulating and paring "as feels most aligned”, is the muscle the current age is built to weaken.
Becoming it within Being! Yes! The honest metaphor, and the one nobody can sell.
This is a comment that went somewhere. Thank you for the mango, I'll be ruining fruit thinking about it!
What Jung says and I add my two cents into, is that we circumambulate the countenance of the soul, non-linearly in a spiral of Becoming, like you said, going around the center of Being, verses attempting to directly find the self/center.
The journey is toward the center, our wholeness, but there's no one white whale self there like the essay critiques, no one god of monotheism, but rather a polytheistic plethora of partial identities vying for our attention all of whom together make up the composite self, which for Jung signifies that there is "not a fixed destination but a dynamic, ongong relationship with the totality of one's being."
The spiral is the correction my essay needed because I left attention sounding too linear, too much like deliberate brick-laying, and you've put the wobble back into it. We don't march at the centre. We orbit, overshoot, come round again at a slightly different height, and the centre stays a direction rather than an address.
But the polytheism is where I'd press a little, Michael. If the self is a plethora of partial figures all bidding for attention, then the modern trouble is that the loudest bidders aren't ours anymore. The feed has installed its own deities in the pantheon, and they're well funded. Jung's gods at least came from inside. Now there's an outside party stuffing the ballot, and circumambulating a centre that's been partly colonised is harder than it was in his day.
A dynamic relationship with the totality, never a fixed arrival. Yes! Thank you for bringing him in properly, you've left my essay more honest than you found it!
Let's go back to Rousseau, that rabble-rising revolutionary inciting the Storming of the Bastille with his essay's, whose discourses on the Arts and Sciences and Language and Inequality and the critique upon civilisation itself as a corruption of human goodness, instrumentally ushered in the paradigm shift from the feudal to the modern outlook on the individual and society.
Before, one knew their place in an foreordained social order conferring on the individual their notion of self. With the breakdown of that order, confirmed in the constitutional democracy of the United States, the individual was set free to determine who they were.
Presently we find ourselves--after the countercultural episode of mind-expansion in the 1960's and its social disruption stemming from the inside of the psyche, and most recently with the screen culture and literacy gone global, with its inner upheaval from the feed itself blowing us away from without--today at a poignant moment steeped in a mythic and epochal entelechy for the entire planet, housed in the highly mobile local, and our everywhere wired lives, leading us through the events of the here and now, with the portending denouement of this Anthropocene story, built into the Cosmogenesis itself, so it seems.
Mead's "the I and the me" can help us sort things out a bit here too. The "me" is Wilson's worm's eye view of social identity, while the "I" is the bird's eye view of one's autonomy and creative response to the "me". Agency and group identity simultaneously as in McGilchrist's dual hemispheric dynamism in our brain. Aided by all the neurosciences' further explorations into the details elucidating the logistics and plausible sources of our arriving at dyadic consciousness.
Which accounts for the Sun and Moon in our astrological charts. The rest of the story is in the dynamic influences coming from the transiting planets in the only neighborhood we have in the infinities of the Universe at large.
These are forces far greater than us, the true deities and original pantheon, and the root source of the multiple aspects of our selves and the world about us. And nothing is stationary as all are orbiting and spinning, in an expanding universe. So where does one rest their head in such a topsy-turvy kinesis, when the nocturnal dream itself is moving us through astral planes?
Our body gives us the ground upon which to touch earth and reach to the sky. And it is only "the suitcase of our mortal life" which allows us to be present here and now, and is the vessel for all the fluidity of our sundry terrestrial selves.
And finally Jung and Hillman, and the dynamics of the persona and the ego and the deeper syzygy of anima and animus in respect to the body, an astrological-like web of complex psychology as could be, all need to be brought into the picture to clarify the resolution to better see what we are looking at here.
And it comes down to the imagination, the eyes of the soul, where our body itself is an imaginal reality, through which the soul manifests. As well our egos are imaginal, "one mythic character among many in the soul's polytheistic drama." And the persona, our social mask is where "daimonic presences or gods are acting through us...and gives shape to our character and destiny."
And then the syzygy, the divine pairing in the psyche, the hieros gamos, our original hermaphroditic totality of being is grounded in the very structure of perception itself whereby our egoic identity is alway in a dynamic relation between them, the exteriority and critiquing aspect of the animus and the interiority and imagining feature of anima.
Therefore "The Problem with Finding Yourself" and the misguided search that was wrong from the start! For Brancusi's essence of flight, the essence of self is syzygy consciousness. For both this is an eternal dance between our apperceived materially caused Existence and our appresenting formally caused Essence, and together they are the Waltzing Matilda, on the spiral journey that is becoming the final cause of our being.
The salon with this Rousseau-like fomenting essay, has brought this conversation into the light of today, and it's awesome, thank you for it all, Tamara, our Museguided one!
And may the wonderfully pictured group mimesis of your fellow Romanian countryman Brancusi's "essence of flight", wing this virtual exchange into an in-person present tense of your dream come true, for all of us, in our various local environs and habitats...Zoom anyone?
A correction first, fondly, because you have handed me a historian's nightmare and I can't let it pass. Rousseau died in 1778, eleven years before the Bastille fell, so he stormed nothing but the salons, and the Terror's men quoted him at the scaffold like people quote anyone safely dead, able to claim him because he couldn't object. The dead author is the most useful kind. He becomes whatever the living need, which is its own small proof of your thesis, that even Rousseau's self got made, posthumously, by what others chose to attend to in him.
Mead is the genuinely useful pull here. The "I" and the "me" gives the dialogue a structure you can actually feel from the inside, the social me handed to us and the I that answers back, and your move to set it beside McGilchrist's hemispheres is the right instinct. Two systems, one body, never resolved, always negotiating. That non-resolution is the engine. The moment the I and the me agree completely you've got either a saint or a corpse.
Where I stay agnostic is the syzygy as destination. An eternal dance I'll take. A final cause I won't because the whole essay resists the arrival, and a divine pairing we are spiralling toward is still an arrival in fancier dress. I'd rather leave us mid-waltz with no last bar.
And yes to the in-person dream! The flock wants a room, not a screen. You’re amazing, Michael!
There you are! fully fletched with your imperfect wings over your head and with two impossible birds trying to fly exactly as implausibly as the five or so Brancusi ones behind and forming a flock with them, that's how you find yourself! How wonderful and how brilliant to conclude this inconclusive essay with these pictures!
“Flock” is the word I didn't have for it, and now I can't unsee it :)! Three flailing humans and five impossible statues, all pointed up, none of us managing actual flight, which is exactly the right number of failures to make a formation. The birds have had 90 years to not arrive and they're still up there reaching. We'd had about 90 seconds and a glass of champagne each. Fully fletched and still can't fly…. That's my whole essay in your phrase, better than my last paragraph did it!
Thank you for seeing the photos as an ending and not a postscript, Ivy! You read the wings right.
The word “remaking” carries a small mercy I didn't stress enough, so I'm glad you reached for it, Tina. If we're remade every moment, then nothing is the final cut. The bitter version of you from last year, the anxious one from this morning, neither is essential unless the looking keeps choosing them. Awful days are real, but they aren't structural. They get a vote, not a veto. That's oddly the most hopeful thing in the whole grim machinery.
Thank you for sitting with it long enough to feel the cycle, not just read about it!
Tina and Tamara, this reminds me of TS Eliot's lines in 4 Quartets (East Coker): 'The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking. Valuation of all we have been.'
So you are saying that our selves are shaped by what we give our attention to?
And people often don’t realize that what they are paying attention to is shaping them?
If so, yes, there is truth to that. Though I don’t think creating yourself is simply whatever you let your eyes rest on. Even if I give something attention, even if I cannot unlive the experience, I can still choose to not let it be my compass.
Yes, that's the spine of it! And your pushback is fine, except that I would just locate the choice a little differently than you do because the refusal to let a thing be your compass, is itself an act of attention. A hard one. You're attending to the experience and to your own response to it at the same time, holding it at arm's length, watching yourself watch it. That second look is the freedom. But it's expensive and most people can't sustain it, which is why the compass usually gets set by default, by the thing we looked at without also looking at ourselves looking. The unexamined gaze is the one that steers.
So we don't fully disagree. I'd only say the choice you're claiming isn't outside attention. It's attention doubled back on itself, and that's rarer than it feels from the inside.
Thank you for your objection that sharpened the thing!
Yes, the unexamined gaze is the one that steers, that choice only comes when attention doubles back on itself, fits with Socrates' the unreflected life is not worth living. And look what it got him! Which is why the second look, the bird's eye view supplementing the worm's eye view of Wilson, is what can extricate us from our myopia, and give us the wings to fly like Brancusi's birds, and the fame of a man who did not need to leave the cage of capital punishnent, to be free.
Socrates is the right thread, but notice the cost you have smuggled in with him. The second look got him hemlock. The reflected life and the comfortable life aren't always the same purchase, and Athens made that explicit, they killed the man precisely for not stopping the examination when asked. So the bird's-eye view isn't free. It often estranges you from the people content with the worm's-eye, and there's a loneliness in altitude nobody mentions when they sell self-knowledge as wellness.
Free in the cell, yes! Though I'd never want to undersell what the cell actually cost him. Thank you for flying Wilson and Socrates into the same sentence, Michael, that's a reach most wouldn't risk! But I expect that from you.
I read somewhere the cell cost Socrates his mortality yes, but it bought him immortality in the eyes of humanity: one small death for a principled man, one giant leap for the conscience of humanity.
The riff is fun, but I'd resist the trade a little, because "he bought immortality" makes it sound like a calculated purchase, and the unsettling thing about Socrates is that the fame was never his to spend. He got nothing. The immortality accrued to us, to the idea, to Plato's bookshelf. The man drank the cup and stopped. We are the ones who cashed the cheque, and there's something almost embarrassing in how comfortably the living narrate the dead man's sacrifice as his good fortune. Easy to call hemlock a giant leap when you're not the one swallowing.
Still, the Armstrong cadence made me grin. Thank you for it!
The door of the cell was open, Socrates could have left as his friends were urging him to do. I am sure he was not choosing the hemlock for the immortal fame it would bring him posthumously. I think his daimon made him do it!
Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung's last book, published after he had died, was not going to happen, even with all the initiative and help for the prospect offered by Jaffe. It happened because of his dream guides, who told him so.
Huxley was dying in 1962 of a painful and difficult laryngeal cancer. He was able to pass into the next world peacefully, with his wife's help, administering intamuscular LSD, which would not have happened otherwise without the tipping point into the psychic world, full stop.
From the outside these instances of breaching our rational limits of understanding makes it not worth the bother of giving it another thought! But why not, the entire mystical and spiritual traditions of human culture attend to just these off the map, where dragons roam, unknown areas.
So why would Socrates's listen to his "irrational" daimon and not his friends, or Jung at over eighty and a long life of writing and work behind him, why such an effort now, or Huxley, why not just get knocked out with morphine?
In all three instances, the other side of what makes us tick is coming through, when it counts, to alter the story in a way which completes the picture of a human life.
The daimon, the dream guides and the LSD offer the depth needed to see that each of their motives did not come from the limiting view of our status bound social ego but from the greater whole of the psyche's totality. When dealing with ultimate eschatologies, our frame of reference shifts to the eternal coordinates of the astral plane and the divinities of the archetypal spirit world.
So the hemlock was Socrates' LSD, which his daimon trasmuted. And Jung's last book was a dream come true. Huxley had the best option on the table available, which established a high watermark for what is possible for so many under similar conditions, were anyone so versed in their own psyche.
Thanks the riff turned into a conversation Tamara, it really helps fill my presently open-ended but forlorn days with new prospects of meaningful exchange where is is most needed, with your essays paving the way!
Reading this, I kept hearing Brâncuși: “simplicity is complexity resolved.” Your reflections on attention touch a truth I’ve lived for years — that we’re sculpted from complexity itself, and the self is simply the form our attention slowly makes.
That line of his is sly because resolved makes it sound finished and clean, when the resolving is decades of mess that simply no longer shows. The simplicity is essential . It's holding back everything he tried and ground off and abandoned. So when you say sculpted from complexity, I'd just add that the complexity doesn't disappear in the made self, it gets compressed and hidden inside the smooth surface, the way the discarded marble is the reason the final form stands. Simple is the most expensive thing there is!
You have lived it for years, not just read it, and that is what gives your comment its weight. Phil, thank you for bringing him back in his own words!
Tamara, the complexity never disappears. We resolve it, and what remains becomes the inner architecture, the tensegrity that lets a life hold its shape. The remnants stay, not to steer, but to become part of what supports the form in its simple uniqueness.
Something paradoxical about going to an exotic location to find something that is on display in everything you do or pay attention to, as you say, every single minute.
More practically though, the relationship i have with the ordinary moments, in this cutrent place and this current life, will have more to do with how I feel about how my life is going, than any extraordinary trip. There is nothing romantic or conventionally fulfilling in dropping into this life instead of pining for some other life that is always one trip away.
The trip is always one trip away on purpose. If you booked it and arrived and the ache resolved, you'd lose the ache, and the ache turns out to be doing a job, it lets you not be here without admitting you've checked out. A standing excuse with a boarding pass attached.
And dropping in is unromantic because nobody can sell it to you. There's no package. No one profits from your day going well in the kitchen you already have. Which might be the quiet test of whether a thing is real, that the market has no interest in it.
Thank you for landing on the ordinary.! That's the harder address to live at.
Love those photos of the three girls from Romania…you are definitely the one who studied ballet all those years. Loved the essay, too. My golden rectangle and I will be back later…must walk the birds…I mean dog./t
Caught! The arms give it away every time, apparently, even decades on and even when I think I'm just standing there. The body keeps the receipts. And "walk the birds" might be the best slip anyone's left me. Freud would have a field day, Brâncuși would approve.
Three things at once, yes, and the audience reads them as one gesture without ever separating the voices, which is the whole trick. The arms lie, the hands qualify, the fingers add the footnote nobody consciously catches but everybody feels. Most people talk in a single channel. A trained body runs several and makes them rhyme. Thank you, you've clearly watched closely, that observation only comes from looking!
There may be two selves. There is a false self I show the world, hoping I can fool some of the people, some of the time. Then there is the real one, buried under the mask. It emerges when I am alone and in times of stress. “Sorry, that was so unlike me”. Not really. Both are developed by my attentions. The false one by my attention to others. I imitate who I wish to impress and hide what they might turn away from. Merging the two approaches integrity. “I need to find myself” means “I don’t like what I’ve become”. From experience the demolition and reconstruction is painful and takes a long time. It’s like destroying the foundation of a house and rebuilding it, brick by brick, when you only get handed a new brick once a week, at best. Months may go by with no new bricks and then an inspiration, a bag of bricks. After a time, years usually, one can look in the mirror and no longer be repulsed. One can be in public without carefully attending the mask.
The line I would press on is "sorry, that was so unlike me”, because you're right that it's a lie, and a revealing one, since we only ever apologise for the self we'd rather disown, never for the polished one. Nobody says "sorry, that was so unlike me" after being charming. The phrase is a tell. It marks the exact seam where we've decided which version gets to count as real, and we always award realness to the flattering one and call the other an aberration. Your honesty is in reversing that. The stressed, alone, unguarded one has at least as much claim, maybe more, since it shows up when there's no audience to perform for.
The brick delivery schedule, one a week at best, sometimes a dry month then a sudden bag, that's the truest description of slow change I've read. Nobody warns you the materials arrive on no schedule you control.
Robert, thank you for the years it clearly took to know this! It reads as earned, not theorised.
I read this very early in the morning, having, yes, reached for my phone and trained my attention on that glowing object of self-referentiality in the way I have been carefully trained to do by a culture that names that 'freedom'. I fell back asleep for a little while (actual freedom!), and your words - their cadences and syntax, ideas and imagery - met some ideas I am tending in my mind's garden that I hope, one day, will bloom and flower and even fruit. (I am in the middle of a Master's degree and considering a PhD: academia is both a restriction and a stabilising frame for my over-active ('gifted' AKA, in todays's parlance, neurodivergent) mind.)
As ever, your essay sparked so much. I taught yoga for 20 years and left that world heartsick at its reification of cultural mores such as the one you draw attention to here. Indian traditions, far from the blind guru worship our society deems them, say very clearly: choose your practice based upon what you wish to achieve. And some of them, it is true, posit an unchanging, stable self that can be revealed through diligent practice - thought his is of course rather different from simply going on holiday to Goa or indeed anywhere else. Others, though, reject the idea of the 'Self of the self' who, pristine and untouched, simply awaits discovery. Buddhism, for instance, contains teachings on the 'chain of causation' that links action to reaction, event to self-image. Classical tantra's focus is on the raw material of creativity through which we fashion our internal worlds and see that reflected out there in the 'real' world through a basic misconception of the relationship between self/other. The point being: depending upon the self one wishes to be in relationship with, one must choose practice carefully.
Personally, I love the lines from Marchado's poem. I cannot pretend I fully understand it, but it offers me valuable enquiry:
Traveller, your footprints are the road and nothing more;
The Indian point you make undoes a laziness in my essay, and I should own that. I let "find yourself" stand in for all inward practice, when what you describe is the opposite of the Goa flight, choose the practice for the end you want, which already concedes the self is fashioned rather than uncovered. The holiday-seeker and the serious practitioner use overlapping language and mean contrary things. I flattened them. The tradition I was mocking is mostly the Western gift-shop edit of yours, the guru worship you left heartsick over, stripped of the part where you have to actually do the work for decades.
And the two camps you set side by side, the one positing a pristine self awaiting revelation and the one rejecting it, map almost exactly onto the argument I keep having in the comments here. Buddhism's chain of causation is my made-self in older and better clothes. Action to reaction, event to self-image, no untouched core, just the accumulation. Brâncuși could have been a footnote to it.
Machado, though, is the gift. The road made by walking, and the line that catches me is the one looking back, the path never to be trodden again because it means the made self isn't even repeatable. You can't return and re-walk it to check. The making is one-way, and the looking-back shows only sea. I'll carry that.
Good luck with the PhD, Inanna, the frame that restricts is often the one that lets the overactive mind bear fruit! Thank you for a comment I'll be thinking about for days!
A hoot I'll happily take, it's not the word people usually reach for with the philosophy crowd, and that's precisely why I like it! The grim stuff goes down better with a laugh smuggled in. Thank you, Meera, that's a deal I'm glad to keep my end of!
Tamara, this is exactly the theme you have a gift for choosing and then Museguiding far beyond the obvious. You take a familiar phrase and dismantle it until we realize we’ve been carrying around a metaphor that never made sense in the first place.
Attention may build a self, but it also edits one. We talk about what we look at, but rarely about what we no longer see. A photographer friend once told me that every photograph is an act of exclusion before it’s an act of inclusion. The frame matters because of everything left outside it. I think people are similar. At some point, I became convinced I was an impatient person. Then I noticed I’d been attending almost exclusively to deadlines, delays, queues, and inefficiencies for years. The evidence was overwhelming because I had curated it myself. The moment I started paying attention to moments that required patience, for instance a conversation with my grandfather, teaching a child to tie shoelaces, making a proper risotto, I discovered I was starving one version of myself and feeding another.
That’s why your Brâncuși metaphor is so perfect. We imagine identity as archaeology when it’s much closer to gardening. Nothing is buried waiting to be found. Things grow where attention is watered. Neglect is also a creative act.
And I laughed at the “facilitator of arrival”. If anyone ever introduces themselves to me that way, I’m immediately departing.
A beautiful essay, full of nuance, wit, and intellectual range. As usual, Tamara, you’ve taken a concept everyone thinks they understand and turned it a few degrees until an entirely different shape appears.
….. and the risotto is what gets me because you can't hurry one, the rice decides the pace, and standing there stirring is a tiny daily tutorial in not being the impatient person you'd cast yourself as. You found the counter-evidence in the saucepan. I love that the proof was that domestic (* especially because I’m incapable of doing it!).
Your photographer friend has handed me something fascinating , the exclusion before the inclusion. It means every self is also a vast unphotographed remainder, all the versions we framed out, still technically there, just never developed. The impatient you didn't vanish when you started watering patience. She's still in the contact sheet. Probably resurfaces in traffic. And the unsettling part of your gardening image is that gardens revert. Stop attending and the old growth, the bramble, the impatience, comes back hard, since neglect doesn't return you to neutral, it returns you to whatever's most vigorous and least chosen.
Depart immediately, yes! Anyone facilitating your arrival is mostly facilitating their invoice. Thank you for bringing the grandfather and the shoelaces into it, chère Céline! Specifics like that are worth more than agreement.
Imagine working 10 hours a day as a plumber for 20 years, but telling yourself in your mind that you're a surgeon because that's what you always wanted to be, and in your most delusional moments, still convince yourself that it's what you will pursue. At a dinner party, when a stranger asks you what you do, you would say that you're a plumber because to claim otherwise would be a lie at best, and insane at worst.
Seems obvious, except we tell this exact lie, and indulge this exact brand of delusion, whenever we talk about our identities; about "finding ourselves". The only difference is the abstraction of identity as a concept, which is so good at obfuscating the truth that we use it to soothe ourselves and to cope with uncertainty and disappointment.
And it is cope. To accept that it isn't who we are, but what we do that defines us, is to face the fact that our current state of dissatisfaction - and to be clear, we're all dissatisfied fundamentally despite what we tell ourselves and others - is in fact indistinguishable from who we are. It's not the totality of who you are, necessarily, but it is the culmination of all of your choices and experiences, combined with some impossibly encrypted genetic code.
The irony is that facing this devastating truth is the thing that might just be painful enough to get us to move, to change, to take steps to become the person we delude ourselves into thinking we are. But because the pleasure of a rehearsed dream often wins over the prospect of vacillating between the tedium and terror of real change, we book trips, buy consultations and consume products to find, not ourselves, but refuge from the pain of truly owning the sum total of our accrued calamities.
Devastating, Tamara, so naturally I love it.
At least the plumber who calls himself a surgeon still shows up to the actual pipes. That's the part I keep turning over in your version. The hands know. The body files the 20 years correctly even while the mouth lies at the dinner table, and there's a strange mercy in that because it means the truth is already stored somewhere, waiting, whether or not we ever consult it.
But I would push on the dissatisfaction. I'm not sure it's the floor under all of us. Some people seem to have made peace with the pipes. Not delusion, not cope, just an actual settling, and I can never tell from the outside whether they've achieved something I haven't or simply stopped asking the question that keeps me up. The Marcus problem again. You only get the inside of one head.
And your last move is the cruel one, that the truth hurts enough to be useful. Pain as the only reliable engine. I half believe it. The other half has watched people sit inside a devastating clarity for years and not move an inch, narrating their own paralysis beautifully. Cioran built a career there.
Andrew, this was a little essay behaving as a comment. Thank you for spending it here instead of keeping it!
Magnificent. I love the inversion at its heart, perhaps we don't become what we seek, but what we repeatedly notice. It's rather like astronomy. The stars you chart determine the map you navigate by, even though the night sky contains infinitely more than you ever see. Attention is not a flashlight. attention is a cartographer. Every sustained gaze redraws the borders of the self.
And choosing Brâncuși was inspired. No artist better demonstrates that identity is not discovered in a single revelation but distilled through relentless refinement, each sculpture less an answer than another approximation. That is exactly what you achieve. Beautifully argued, intellectually generous, and written with the rare ability to make philosophy feel like lived experience rather than abstraction. Tamara, you never disappoint.
Ohhhh the cartographer image is better than anything I gave them, but I'd add the part that frightens me about old maps. They get inherited. Someone charts a coastline wrong, draws a sea serpent where the data ran out, and ships avoid that stretch of ocean for two centuries. We navigate by selves drawn long ago, by attentions we no longer even remember choosing, and most of us never sail back to check whether the monster was real. The map outlives the looking that made it. That's the trouble with distillation too, it's irreversible. You can't un-refine….
Lovely to be read by someone who reaches for the heavens to explain the inward, dear Clara! Thank you, truly!
Staying with the astronomy metaphor and Brancusi's modus operandi, they can be seen dovetaling together. In the contemporary star gazing Hubble telescope it takes over eleven continuous days aimed at the smallest sector of "empty" night sky to actually see the thousands of galaxies that are there. (Compare the duration of our eye which resets it's image every 0.1 seconds.)
So Brancusi and Van Gogh and especially Cezanne in their different themes and mediums, saw what is there only by stacking their dedicated attention on the same familiar spot on their horizon to reveal the deep image that depicts the anima mundi for the artist and the vast universe for the astronomer.
The Hubble figure is the keeper here, 11 days on a patch of nothing to let the faint stuff accumulate into galaxies. That's the exposure time the self never gets given anymore. We reset every 0.1 seconds and then refresh the feed on top of that, so the dim things, the slow-developing ones, never reach the plate. We shoot our own portrait at a shutter speed that guarantees blur and then wonder why nobody's home in the picture.
Cézanne is your sharpest example, actually! Same mountain, hundreds of times, Sainte-Victoire refusing to be finished. He was integrating the signal, like the telescope, like Brâncuși's birds. Attention as a long exposure.
Michael, thank you for the deep field, it gives the whole argument a literal photograph!
This makes feel me better about painting inner fire over and over again for the last five years. There is transition to water happening though 🤔
This is a really powerful and helpful metaphor for me in my artistic practice 🙏🏻
Tamara, how remarkable this essay is. You’ve taken an abstract cultural cliché, “finding yourself”, and dismantled it without becoming cynical. Instead of criticizing the idea, you replace it with a more rigorous and convincing model of personhood.
The comparison with Brâncuși is stupendous because it does more than provide an elegant metaphor. It reorganizes the entire argument. Your essay pivots on a crucial distinction, discovery versus construction. Brâncuși’s birds are not hidden truths extracted from matter but forms accumulated through sustained attention. By the time the comparison returns in the final pages, it no longer feels illustrative, it feels explanatory. The bird becomes a theory of identity.
I love the pragmatic insight that attention is a manufacturing process. We often speak as though our choices reveal who we are, when in practice our repeated attentions may be doing more of the work. The implication is unsettling, identity may be less a matter of values than of exposure. Show me what occupies your eyes for five years and I can make a better prediction about who you are becoming than if you hand me your list of principles.
The sharpest observation arrives, the self is being made whether we participate consciously or not. That turns selfhood from a philosophical puzzle into an allocation problem. The question is no longer “Who am I?” but “What am I feeding the machinery that produces me?” That reframing feels both contemporary and deeply ancient, which is why the references to James, Aurelius, Murdoch, and McGilchrist land so naturally.
Most essays about authenticity assume there is a buried essence waiting for excavation. This one suggests something far more demanding, there may be no treasure underground, only a workshop. And workshops require discipline, repetition, and attention rather than revelation. That is a much less romantic idea, and a much more useful one.
A superb piece of writing that manages to be intellectually ambitious without losing narrative charm. Like Brâncuși’s studio, it leaves us, the readers, with the suspicion that becoming is always more interesting than finding.
That’s excellent, the allocation problem…. it has a budget, and the brutal thing about attention is that the budget is fixed and shrinking and mostly already spent before we are awake enough to choose. So the discipline I keep praising is somehow a fiction. Most of what makes us got allocated by default, by where we happened to be born and what happened to be glowing nearby. The workshop has an owner, and for long stretches it isn't us, which is where I would complicate the prediction game. 5 years of someone's eyes will tell you a great deal, agreed, more than their principles. Except the eyes sometimes resist. A person can be soaked in something for a decade and curdle against it, define themselves by the refusal, and now the exposure predicts the opposite of what it fed in. The convert, the apostate, the kid raised on a thing who spends adulthood escaping it. Attention shapes, yes! It just doesn't always shape in the direction of the stimulus, and that small unruliness is maybe the only freedom left in the model.
You read it the way one reads when one is also a maker, watching the joinery and not just the surface, Alexander! Thank you for the time this clearly took!
This is priceless! I wish we could put together all the comments and your replies into a book.
One day… who knows?! :)
Oh, this essay came out at a perfect timing……after a sleep full of dreams, that left me quite thinking. Being on the threshold of turning fifty, it’s unavoidable to ruminate on what may have been. How many decisions have been made that brought me to where I am now? What if? Many lives I thought were mine, only to be forgotten when I discovered new lives to be lived. Sometimes I think that my voracious curiosity is more a curse than a blessing: how can I be what I want to be if I get continuously swayed by the beauty in this world? But I lived long enough to know that I don’t have enough time left, so every decision on what to pay attention to has become more painful, because it means I need to mourn the rest. But isn’t this the way we create ourselves? Repeatedly deciding what deserves our finite attention, and accepting an identity built as much from the lives we relinquish as from the ones we pursue? I think so, but it’s painful: this is why I think some night a dream come back to haunt me: “Enzo, what made you think you were becoming wise?...ah, poor fool……”.
The mourning is the part nobody warns you about, Enzo. Every act of attention at 50 is also a small funeral for the 4 lives you didn't pick that morning. In your 20s the unchosen lives felt stored, deferred, collectable later. Now they're losses in real time, and the curiosity that once felt like abundance starts feeling like grief on a schedule. I don't think that's the curse you fear it is, though. The voracious are simply paying the cost more consciously. The incurious mourn nothing because they noticed nothing, and that's the worse bargain, an easy peace bought with a narrow life.
That dream-voice mocking your wisdom, I'd almost trust it. The fool who knows the question is still standing closer to wisdom than the man who stopped asking and called it arrival.
Thank you for bringing the dream and the threshold both! This is the comment of someone actually doing the work my essay only describes.
thank you for the kind words. I've come to terms with myself knowing that I would rather bear the grief of abundance than the peace of indifference.
Thank you too, Enzo!
Oh yes! At 60 this is definitely my reality. I am surprised how long it took me to recognize that choosing one thing was excluding several others! Thank you for your honesty, Enzo.
“The search was the wrong idea from the start.” Call me Ishmael, but Captain Ahab knew this error as well as anyone. We want our select selves to be a white whale we can pin down, but it’s more like a well-peeled mango: the self is a really slippery business. It’s hard to hold for long. Sure, parts of us persist through time; ballet lines do come into focus first for a ballerina, grievance does define a divorced man that swims in his grievance, any white whale from our past or future gives some shape to that elusive sense of continuity. But the world is ever in motion. A self exists within that roiling reality. It must be perpetually updated to accommodate a shifting reality, which makes actually defining it terribly hazardous.
To seek it is folly. It unfolds as it exchanges tokens of its being with the larger environment, consuming this or that, accumulating and paring as feels most aligned with the momentum we are simply tracking. It does not exist as a place, a location, an isolated node within the web of life. History matters. Aspirations matter. Choices matter. But searching for a center is best described as grasping the mango too tightly. It will squirt away and splat on some surface where it must be recovered, only to slip away again if we are careless. Finding it is the wrong idea. Well said. Becoming it within Being is the only honest metaphor.
Ah ah ah…. so good, the mango earns its place against the whale, and here's why I think it actually beats Melville for your purposes. Ahab's whale is out there, separate, huntable, a thing with coordinates. The mango is in your own hand. You don’t chase it across an ocean, you lose it at the kitchen counter, which is the more honest predicament. The slipperiness is that the thing won't stay gripped even when you've got it, because gripping changes it, warms it, breaks the flesh. Attention does that too. The looking alters what's looked at, so the self you pin is already not the self that moved.
I would lean on your phrasing … "tokens of its being exchanged with the environment”. Yes! Though I'd say the environment now does more of the exchanging than we do. It pushes tokens at us faster than we select them. Ahab at least chose his whale, we mostly get assigned ours by whatever is the loudest in the water, and the discipline, the accumulating and paring "as feels most aligned”, is the muscle the current age is built to weaken.
Becoming it within Being! Yes! The honest metaphor, and the one nobody can sell.
This is a comment that went somewhere. Thank you for the mango, I'll be ruining fruit thinking about it!
What Jung says and I add my two cents into, is that we circumambulate the countenance of the soul, non-linearly in a spiral of Becoming, like you said, going around the center of Being, verses attempting to directly find the self/center.
The journey is toward the center, our wholeness, but there's no one white whale self there like the essay critiques, no one god of monotheism, but rather a polytheistic plethora of partial identities vying for our attention all of whom together make up the composite self, which for Jung signifies that there is "not a fixed destination but a dynamic, ongong relationship with the totality of one's being."
The spiral is the correction my essay needed because I left attention sounding too linear, too much like deliberate brick-laying, and you've put the wobble back into it. We don't march at the centre. We orbit, overshoot, come round again at a slightly different height, and the centre stays a direction rather than an address.
But the polytheism is where I'd press a little, Michael. If the self is a plethora of partial figures all bidding for attention, then the modern trouble is that the loudest bidders aren't ours anymore. The feed has installed its own deities in the pantheon, and they're well funded. Jung's gods at least came from inside. Now there's an outside party stuffing the ballot, and circumambulating a centre that's been partly colonised is harder than it was in his day.
A dynamic relationship with the totality, never a fixed arrival. Yes! Thank you for bringing him in properly, you've left my essay more honest than you found it!
Ohhhh how much I love this conversation! Priceless! I’m dreaming of having it in person.
Wow, count me-we in too!
Let's go back to Rousseau, that rabble-rising revolutionary inciting the Storming of the Bastille with his essay's, whose discourses on the Arts and Sciences and Language and Inequality and the critique upon civilisation itself as a corruption of human goodness, instrumentally ushered in the paradigm shift from the feudal to the modern outlook on the individual and society.
Before, one knew their place in an foreordained social order conferring on the individual their notion of self. With the breakdown of that order, confirmed in the constitutional democracy of the United States, the individual was set free to determine who they were.
Presently we find ourselves--after the countercultural episode of mind-expansion in the 1960's and its social disruption stemming from the inside of the psyche, and most recently with the screen culture and literacy gone global, with its inner upheaval from the feed itself blowing us away from without--today at a poignant moment steeped in a mythic and epochal entelechy for the entire planet, housed in the highly mobile local, and our everywhere wired lives, leading us through the events of the here and now, with the portending denouement of this Anthropocene story, built into the Cosmogenesis itself, so it seems.
Mead's "the I and the me" can help us sort things out a bit here too. The "me" is Wilson's worm's eye view of social identity, while the "I" is the bird's eye view of one's autonomy and creative response to the "me". Agency and group identity simultaneously as in McGilchrist's dual hemispheric dynamism in our brain. Aided by all the neurosciences' further explorations into the details elucidating the logistics and plausible sources of our arriving at dyadic consciousness.
Which accounts for the Sun and Moon in our astrological charts. The rest of the story is in the dynamic influences coming from the transiting planets in the only neighborhood we have in the infinities of the Universe at large.
These are forces far greater than us, the true deities and original pantheon, and the root source of the multiple aspects of our selves and the world about us. And nothing is stationary as all are orbiting and spinning, in an expanding universe. So where does one rest their head in such a topsy-turvy kinesis, when the nocturnal dream itself is moving us through astral planes?
Our body gives us the ground upon which to touch earth and reach to the sky. And it is only "the suitcase of our mortal life" which allows us to be present here and now, and is the vessel for all the fluidity of our sundry terrestrial selves.
And finally Jung and Hillman, and the dynamics of the persona and the ego and the deeper syzygy of anima and animus in respect to the body, an astrological-like web of complex psychology as could be, all need to be brought into the picture to clarify the resolution to better see what we are looking at here.
And it comes down to the imagination, the eyes of the soul, where our body itself is an imaginal reality, through which the soul manifests. As well our egos are imaginal, "one mythic character among many in the soul's polytheistic drama." And the persona, our social mask is where "daimonic presences or gods are acting through us...and gives shape to our character and destiny."
And then the syzygy, the divine pairing in the psyche, the hieros gamos, our original hermaphroditic totality of being is grounded in the very structure of perception itself whereby our egoic identity is alway in a dynamic relation between them, the exteriority and critiquing aspect of the animus and the interiority and imagining feature of anima.
Therefore "The Problem with Finding Yourself" and the misguided search that was wrong from the start! For Brancusi's essence of flight, the essence of self is syzygy consciousness. For both this is an eternal dance between our apperceived materially caused Existence and our appresenting formally caused Essence, and together they are the Waltzing Matilda, on the spiral journey that is becoming the final cause of our being.
The salon with this Rousseau-like fomenting essay, has brought this conversation into the light of today, and it's awesome, thank you for it all, Tamara, our Museguided one!
And may the wonderfully pictured group mimesis of your fellow Romanian countryman Brancusi's "essence of flight", wing this virtual exchange into an in-person present tense of your dream come true, for all of us, in our various local environs and habitats...Zoom anyone?
A correction first, fondly, because you have handed me a historian's nightmare and I can't let it pass. Rousseau died in 1778, eleven years before the Bastille fell, so he stormed nothing but the salons, and the Terror's men quoted him at the scaffold like people quote anyone safely dead, able to claim him because he couldn't object. The dead author is the most useful kind. He becomes whatever the living need, which is its own small proof of your thesis, that even Rousseau's self got made, posthumously, by what others chose to attend to in him.
Mead is the genuinely useful pull here. The "I" and the "me" gives the dialogue a structure you can actually feel from the inside, the social me handed to us and the I that answers back, and your move to set it beside McGilchrist's hemispheres is the right instinct. Two systems, one body, never resolved, always negotiating. That non-resolution is the engine. The moment the I and the me agree completely you've got either a saint or a corpse.
Where I stay agnostic is the syzygy as destination. An eternal dance I'll take. A final cause I won't because the whole essay resists the arrival, and a divine pairing we are spiralling toward is still an arrival in fancier dress. I'd rather leave us mid-waltz with no last bar.
And yes to the in-person dream! The flock wants a room, not a screen. You’re amazing, Michael!
There you are! fully fletched with your imperfect wings over your head and with two impossible birds trying to fly exactly as implausibly as the five or so Brancusi ones behind and forming a flock with them, that's how you find yourself! How wonderful and how brilliant to conclude this inconclusive essay with these pictures!
“Flock” is the word I didn't have for it, and now I can't unsee it :)! Three flailing humans and five impossible statues, all pointed up, none of us managing actual flight, which is exactly the right number of failures to make a formation. The birds have had 90 years to not arrive and they're still up there reaching. We'd had about 90 seconds and a glass of champagne each. Fully fletched and still can't fly…. That's my whole essay in your phrase, better than my last paragraph did it!
Thank you for seeing the photos as an ending and not a postscript, Ivy! You read the wings right.
I love this articulation -- the cyclical process of remaking that we are already doing in every moment. Thank you for this piece and awareness.
The word “remaking” carries a small mercy I didn't stress enough, so I'm glad you reached for it, Tina. If we're remade every moment, then nothing is the final cut. The bitter version of you from last year, the anxious one from this morning, neither is essential unless the looking keeps choosing them. Awful days are real, but they aren't structural. They get a vote, not a veto. That's oddly the most hopeful thing in the whole grim machinery.
Thank you for sitting with it long enough to feel the cycle, not just read about it!
Tina and Tamara, this reminds me of TS Eliot's lines in 4 Quartets (East Coker): 'The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking. Valuation of all we have been.'
Perfect quote, Keren!
So you are saying that our selves are shaped by what we give our attention to?
And people often don’t realize that what they are paying attention to is shaping them?
If so, yes, there is truth to that. Though I don’t think creating yourself is simply whatever you let your eyes rest on. Even if I give something attention, even if I cannot unlive the experience, I can still choose to not let it be my compass.
Yes, that's the spine of it! And your pushback is fine, except that I would just locate the choice a little differently than you do because the refusal to let a thing be your compass, is itself an act of attention. A hard one. You're attending to the experience and to your own response to it at the same time, holding it at arm's length, watching yourself watch it. That second look is the freedom. But it's expensive and most people can't sustain it, which is why the compass usually gets set by default, by the thing we looked at without also looking at ourselves looking. The unexamined gaze is the one that steers.
So we don't fully disagree. I'd only say the choice you're claiming isn't outside attention. It's attention doubled back on itself, and that's rarer than it feels from the inside.
Thank you for your objection that sharpened the thing!
Yes, the unexamined gaze is the one that steers, that choice only comes when attention doubles back on itself, fits with Socrates' the unreflected life is not worth living. And look what it got him! Which is why the second look, the bird's eye view supplementing the worm's eye view of Wilson, is what can extricate us from our myopia, and give us the wings to fly like Brancusi's birds, and the fame of a man who did not need to leave the cage of capital punishnent, to be free.
Socrates is the right thread, but notice the cost you have smuggled in with him. The second look got him hemlock. The reflected life and the comfortable life aren't always the same purchase, and Athens made that explicit, they killed the man precisely for not stopping the examination when asked. So the bird's-eye view isn't free. It often estranges you from the people content with the worm's-eye, and there's a loneliness in altitude nobody mentions when they sell self-knowledge as wellness.
Free in the cell, yes! Though I'd never want to undersell what the cell actually cost him. Thank you for flying Wilson and Socrates into the same sentence, Michael, that's a reach most wouldn't risk! But I expect that from you.
I read somewhere the cell cost Socrates his mortality yes, but it bought him immortality in the eyes of humanity: one small death for a principled man, one giant leap for the conscience of humanity.
The riff is fun, but I'd resist the trade a little, because "he bought immortality" makes it sound like a calculated purchase, and the unsettling thing about Socrates is that the fame was never his to spend. He got nothing. The immortality accrued to us, to the idea, to Plato's bookshelf. The man drank the cup and stopped. We are the ones who cashed the cheque, and there's something almost embarrassing in how comfortably the living narrate the dead man's sacrifice as his good fortune. Easy to call hemlock a giant leap when you're not the one swallowing.
Still, the Armstrong cadence made me grin. Thank you for it!
The door of the cell was open, Socrates could have left as his friends were urging him to do. I am sure he was not choosing the hemlock for the immortal fame it would bring him posthumously. I think his daimon made him do it!
Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung's last book, published after he had died, was not going to happen, even with all the initiative and help for the prospect offered by Jaffe. It happened because of his dream guides, who told him so.
Huxley was dying in 1962 of a painful and difficult laryngeal cancer. He was able to pass into the next world peacefully, with his wife's help, administering intamuscular LSD, which would not have happened otherwise without the tipping point into the psychic world, full stop.
From the outside these instances of breaching our rational limits of understanding makes it not worth the bother of giving it another thought! But why not, the entire mystical and spiritual traditions of human culture attend to just these off the map, where dragons roam, unknown areas.
So why would Socrates's listen to his "irrational" daimon and not his friends, or Jung at over eighty and a long life of writing and work behind him, why such an effort now, or Huxley, why not just get knocked out with morphine?
In all three instances, the other side of what makes us tick is coming through, when it counts, to alter the story in a way which completes the picture of a human life.
The daimon, the dream guides and the LSD offer the depth needed to see that each of their motives did not come from the limiting view of our status bound social ego but from the greater whole of the psyche's totality. When dealing with ultimate eschatologies, our frame of reference shifts to the eternal coordinates of the astral plane and the divinities of the archetypal spirit world.
So the hemlock was Socrates' LSD, which his daimon trasmuted. And Jung's last book was a dream come true. Huxley had the best option on the table available, which established a high watermark for what is possible for so many under similar conditions, were anyone so versed in their own psyche.
Thanks the riff turned into a conversation Tamara, it really helps fill my presently open-ended but forlorn days with new prospects of meaningful exchange where is is most needed, with your essays paving the way!
Reading this, I kept hearing Brâncuși: “simplicity is complexity resolved.” Your reflections on attention touch a truth I’ve lived for years — that we’re sculpted from complexity itself, and the self is simply the form our attention slowly makes.
That line of his is sly because resolved makes it sound finished and clean, when the resolving is decades of mess that simply no longer shows. The simplicity is essential . It's holding back everything he tried and ground off and abandoned. So when you say sculpted from complexity, I'd just add that the complexity doesn't disappear in the made self, it gets compressed and hidden inside the smooth surface, the way the discarded marble is the reason the final form stands. Simple is the most expensive thing there is!
You have lived it for years, not just read it, and that is what gives your comment its weight. Phil, thank you for bringing him back in his own words!
Tamara, the complexity never disappears. We resolve it, and what remains becomes the inner architecture, the tensegrity that lets a life hold its shape. The remnants stay, not to steer, but to become part of what supports the form in its simple uniqueness.
So true! Thank you for this, Phil!
Something paradoxical about going to an exotic location to find something that is on display in everything you do or pay attention to, as you say, every single minute.
More practically though, the relationship i have with the ordinary moments, in this cutrent place and this current life, will have more to do with how I feel about how my life is going, than any extraordinary trip. There is nothing romantic or conventionally fulfilling in dropping into this life instead of pining for some other life that is always one trip away.
The trip is always one trip away on purpose. If you booked it and arrived and the ache resolved, you'd lose the ache, and the ache turns out to be doing a job, it lets you not be here without admitting you've checked out. A standing excuse with a boarding pass attached.
And dropping in is unromantic because nobody can sell it to you. There's no package. No one profits from your day going well in the kitchen you already have. Which might be the quiet test of whether a thing is real, that the market has no interest in it.
Thank you for landing on the ordinary.! That's the harder address to live at.
Love those photos of the three girls from Romania…you are definitely the one who studied ballet all those years. Loved the essay, too. My golden rectangle and I will be back later…must walk the birds…I mean dog./t
Caught! The arms give it away every time, apparently, even decades on and even when I think I'm just standing there. The body keeps the receipts. And "walk the birds" might be the best slip anyone's left me. Freud would have a field day, Brâncuși would approve.
Thank you for this, T!
Yep, the arms, the hands, and the fingers...I always think a good dancer is saying at least three different, but related, things!
Three things at once, yes, and the audience reads them as one gesture without ever separating the voices, which is the whole trick. The arms lie, the hands qualify, the fingers add the footnote nobody consciously catches but everybody feels. Most people talk in a single channel. A trained body runs several and makes them rhyme. Thank you, you've clearly watched closely, that observation only comes from looking!
Tamara this is so exquisite, just what my soul needed this morning. Thank you 🙏
Mornings are the honest hour. Thank you so much for reading before the day could crowd it out, Freda!
There may be two selves. There is a false self I show the world, hoping I can fool some of the people, some of the time. Then there is the real one, buried under the mask. It emerges when I am alone and in times of stress. “Sorry, that was so unlike me”. Not really. Both are developed by my attentions. The false one by my attention to others. I imitate who I wish to impress and hide what they might turn away from. Merging the two approaches integrity. “I need to find myself” means “I don’t like what I’ve become”. From experience the demolition and reconstruction is painful and takes a long time. It’s like destroying the foundation of a house and rebuilding it, brick by brick, when you only get handed a new brick once a week, at best. Months may go by with no new bricks and then an inspiration, a bag of bricks. After a time, years usually, one can look in the mirror and no longer be repulsed. One can be in public without carefully attending the mask.
The line I would press on is "sorry, that was so unlike me”, because you're right that it's a lie, and a revealing one, since we only ever apologise for the self we'd rather disown, never for the polished one. Nobody says "sorry, that was so unlike me" after being charming. The phrase is a tell. It marks the exact seam where we've decided which version gets to count as real, and we always award realness to the flattering one and call the other an aberration. Your honesty is in reversing that. The stressed, alone, unguarded one has at least as much claim, maybe more, since it shows up when there's no audience to perform for.
The brick delivery schedule, one a week at best, sometimes a dry month then a sudden bag, that's the truest description of slow change I've read. Nobody warns you the materials arrive on no schedule you control.
Robert, thank you for the years it clearly took to know this! It reads as earned, not theorised.
I read this very early in the morning, having, yes, reached for my phone and trained my attention on that glowing object of self-referentiality in the way I have been carefully trained to do by a culture that names that 'freedom'. I fell back asleep for a little while (actual freedom!), and your words - their cadences and syntax, ideas and imagery - met some ideas I am tending in my mind's garden that I hope, one day, will bloom and flower and even fruit. (I am in the middle of a Master's degree and considering a PhD: academia is both a restriction and a stabilising frame for my over-active ('gifted' AKA, in todays's parlance, neurodivergent) mind.)
As ever, your essay sparked so much. I taught yoga for 20 years and left that world heartsick at its reification of cultural mores such as the one you draw attention to here. Indian traditions, far from the blind guru worship our society deems them, say very clearly: choose your practice based upon what you wish to achieve. And some of them, it is true, posit an unchanging, stable self that can be revealed through diligent practice - thought his is of course rather different from simply going on holiday to Goa or indeed anywhere else. Others, though, reject the idea of the 'Self of the self' who, pristine and untouched, simply awaits discovery. Buddhism, for instance, contains teachings on the 'chain of causation' that links action to reaction, event to self-image. Classical tantra's focus is on the raw material of creativity through which we fashion our internal worlds and see that reflected out there in the 'real' world through a basic misconception of the relationship between self/other. The point being: depending upon the self one wishes to be in relationship with, one must choose practice carefully.
Personally, I love the lines from Marchado's poem. I cannot pretend I fully understand it, but it offers me valuable enquiry:
Traveller, your footprints are the road and nothing more;
traveller, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and when looking back one sees
the path never to be trodden again.
Traveller, there is no road,
only waves on the sea.
The Indian point you make undoes a laziness in my essay, and I should own that. I let "find yourself" stand in for all inward practice, when what you describe is the opposite of the Goa flight, choose the practice for the end you want, which already concedes the self is fashioned rather than uncovered. The holiday-seeker and the serious practitioner use overlapping language and mean contrary things. I flattened them. The tradition I was mocking is mostly the Western gift-shop edit of yours, the guru worship you left heartsick over, stripped of the part where you have to actually do the work for decades.
And the two camps you set side by side, the one positing a pristine self awaiting revelation and the one rejecting it, map almost exactly onto the argument I keep having in the comments here. Buddhism's chain of causation is my made-self in older and better clothes. Action to reaction, event to self-image, no untouched core, just the accumulation. Brâncuși could have been a footnote to it.
Machado, though, is the gift. The road made by walking, and the line that catches me is the one looking back, the path never to be trodden again because it means the made self isn't even repeatable. You can't return and re-walk it to check. The making is one-way, and the looking-back shows only sea. I'll carry that.
Good luck with the PhD, Inanna, the frame that restricts is often the one that lets the overactive mind bear fruit! Thank you for a comment I'll be thinking about for days!
My pleasure, and thank you, as always, for embodying the role of virtual salonnière.
I am grateful to have you as my reader.
Tamara, you had me chuckling right through this piece. You are a hoot. I love your quirky take on things. Keep writing, I'll keep reading.
A hoot I'll happily take, it's not the word people usually reach for with the philosophy crowd, and that's precisely why I like it! The grim stuff goes down better with a laugh smuggled in. Thank you, Meera, that's a deal I'm glad to keep my end of!