Do you believe you have a fixed, unitary self, like you’re a sculpture made from a single kind of stone? Or are you one of those palimpsests I see in subway stations here in Brooklyn, the posters that have been partially torn away to reveal the older posters they were pasted over—the older posters themselves torn to show the still-older posters underneath? Or is it that you feel like a proscenium stage where one self steps forward, speaks their lines, and then shuffles off to wait in the wings while another self takes over?
I wonder which one I am all the time.
I am the life of every party.
A framed poster with the face of Fernando Pessoa hangs on the wall behind my desk. Maybe you know Pessoa. Portuguese poet and writer, a kind of dandified shaman, 1888–1935. Pessoa, the limitless genius who wrote in the voices of what he called his heteronyms—one hundred-odd discrete fictional personas whom he gave individual biographies, writing styles, philosophies (one of the first things non-Portuguese speakers learn about Pessoa is that his name translates, marvelously, to “person”). As Pessoa’s great translator and biographer Richard Zenith tells us, Pessoa “described himself as a ‘secret orchestra’ made up of numerous instruments—strings, harps, timpani, and bass drums.”
If you tell me it’s absurd to speak that way about someone who never existed, I’ll answer that I also have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or anything at all.
Another poster hangs near me as I write, this one to the left of my desk—it’s from a Belgian retrospective of John Cassavetes’s films, and at its center is a photograph of the filmmaker cradling what I believe is a 16mm camera. Maybe you’ve heard the name before. Commonly described as the godfather of independent American cinema, Cassavetes wrote and directed A Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Faces (my favorite), among others. As the scholar Ray Carney writes in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, “[h]e was a trickster, a joker, the life of the party, but at the same time . . . strangely distant and emotionally unreachable. He was the quintessential outsider—a lone wolf hidden behind a wall of jokes and routines. Wherever he was, he wasn’t really there.” The characters in Cassavetes’s films are likewise mercurial, euphoric one moment and devastated the next, talking a blue streak until suddenly they slam into a wall of silence—both blazingly present and forever eluding our grasp.
He also dictated an 800-page novel based on [the film Husbands] to Elaine Goren during lunch breaks . . . doing the voices of each of the film’s characters as he dictated it.
I want to write about the various Coreys who have existed thus far, but I’m not sure whether it’s better to say, “I have been” or “I am.”
I have been I am
The stormy first-grader who’s sent to an alternative public school
The new kid bullied on the playground
The bully preying on classmates in the cafeteria
The younger brother
The older brother
The middle child
The oldest child
The boy who wears a dress to class
The three-sport athlete
The kid who talks to himself at his locker
The student who “just isn’t realizing his potential”
The college football player
The human rights researcher
The novelist
Where does this obsession with multiple selves come from? Religion, maybe. I was raised in a devout household, Roman Catholic, mass at least once a week, prayers before meals, prayers before bed, prayers during school exams—Mom earning money by singing at Sunday services (and baptisms and first communions and confirmations and weddings and funerals). In the thirteen houses and apartments my family occupied by the time I was fifteen, a wall in the living room would sometimes be dedicated to crucifixes, rosaries, and, most importantly, a framed print of William Zdinak’s painting In His Image. From afar, the painting seems like a mottled-but-otherwise-run-of-the-mill depiction of a pensive savior, eyes closed, head bowed under a crown of thorns. But get closer and you’ll see that his face and body are in fact a collage of other faces, some belonging to the famous (Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, MLK, JFK), many to the anonymous. What is melancholy from afar grows unsettling up close; it can seem less that these faces make up his face than that they are crowding it, like so many carbuncles, like he’s infested with the people he has been sent here to save.
I never needed In His Image explained to me, likely because, long before I was old enough to understand what I was saying, I was reciting the Nicene Creed every Sunday morning at mass. The prayer speaks of God as a Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—three distinct entities that simultaneously constitute a single omnipotence, just as all those famous and not-famous faces in Zdinak’s painting add up to Christ. As a kid, I think I must have taken the lesson that if even God couldn’t manage to be a single thing, then surely us humans are a far bigger mess. And while I lost my faith long ago, I have clearly retained this belief in, need for, existential variousness.
Let’s turn to a more recent example.
Growing up, a VHS of David Lynch’s film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me accompanied my family on our moves from town to town, state to state. If I close my eyes, I can easily picture the cover of the VHS sleeve: A photo of the film’s protagonist, Laura Palmer, is fit within half of a heart-shaped locket. Flames lick off the locket’s broken, jagged edge, reaching into the space where the other half of the locket should be—but isn’t.
The VHS belonged to my older brother, Conor, and was stacked in a cardboard box full of his stuff—the box also held his old T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jeans; mementos of his time playing Goofy and Buzz Lightyear at Walt Disney World; plus paperbacks with the covers torn off that he would (okay, maybe a little illegally) bring back from the mall bookstore in suburban Michigan where he worked after he’d escaped from the Magic Kingdom. That box was like a starter kit for maturity: I would wear Conor’s clothes to school, devour his defaced copies of Leaves of Grass and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But I didn’t—wouldn’t, couldn’t—watch Fire Walk With Me. I was scared shitless by the thing, and this fear was nested within a bigger fear of the mysterious show called Twin Peaks to which I knew the movie had some kind of connection. This VHS was the rare piece of the adult world that I had gotten my hands on and didn’t want to experience.
Like the broken locket, fear is incomplete, fear is only half—the fear is always accompanied by the threat. One way to look at adulthood is that it’s the gradual matching up of your childhood fears with their threats and seeing how harmless the whole really is. For whatever reason, it took me until last fall, when I was thirty-eight, to finally feel ready to pair my fear of Fire Walk With Me with the experience of watching it. Fire Walk With Me is technically a prequel, so friends advised me to watch the two original seasons of the television show before I tried the movie. I developed a ritual: I would watch a couple episodes every night, lights off, after my wife had gone to bed. This was a time of dark enchantment—Lynch’s art, maybe foremost, is concerned with what a truly secular magic looks like—and yet I was also antsy to plow through the seasons, be ready to watch, at last, Fire Walk With Me.
Never mind the thirty hours of Lynchian immersion—I still wasn’t prepared for this film. I’m not sure anyone can be. Played by Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer functions as an organizing absence in the original series, the invisible energy on which everything else feeds. She’s described in contradictory fragments by her friends, family, and enemies, and the only time we glimpse the young woman herself is in tantalizingly brief flashbacks, or in wordless camcorder footage, or as a blue-lipped corpse found wrapped in a plastic sheet on a cold lakeshore, or in that famous prom queen photo, or in her cousin Maddy (also played by Lee), or as a warped shadow self who is trapped in the Red Room, a kind of purgatory. But, startlingly, there she is in the film, right in front of us, walking down a leafy suburban street with schoolbooks clutched to her chest. Dimples, hair a softly fried shade of blond, this desperately dreamy look on her face.
That’s only the first of the many Lauras we will meet—the movie isn’t propelled by plot (we already know her fate, as well as who’s responsible for it), but rather by the lurching shifts Laura makes from pert A-student to snarling drug addict; from loving girlfriend to part-time sex worker; from the daughter living in terror of her abusive father to the mystic who knows—and in some senses accepts—the horrific death that awaits her. It is a profoundly frightening movie, with the most harrowing ending this side of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is also, without question, one of the saddest works I will see before I die. And yet I have also felt this abiding exultation since I finished it, that giddy sense of overabundance which always fills me after I’ve encountered great art.
Lynch is often unfairly called chilly and remote. If anything, this film is a work of overwhelming closeness, so intuitively and intimately attuned to the inner life of its subject that the line between sympathy and empathy is obliterated. In Lynch on Lynch, the scholar Chris Rodley notes that, “after the release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch received many letters from young girls who had been abused by their fathers. They were puzzled as to how he could have known exactly what it was like.” More than anything, you come away stunned by Lee’s performance, which is so fierce, so simultaneously controlled and feral, that I’m preemptively frustrated with myself for bringing it up because I know I am not going to do it justice here. I’ll just say that Lee manages to make every version of Laura complete unto herself while, at the same time, conveying that she is far, far greater than the sum of her parts.
The fictional community of Lebanese artists who comprise Walid Raad’s Atlas Group; the shifting chorus of voices who narrate Walter Kempowski’s novels; Anne Carson’s ventriloquization of Marilyn Monroe, Sappho, Artaud—I could happily write in perpetuity about my love for artists whose project is the splintering of the self. But at a certain point, I should probably stop and wonder where this obsession—this search—is going to lead. Will my conception of the self only become more centrifugal as time goes on, until I’ve passed some point of no return?
Recently for the New York Review of Books, Meghan O’Gieblyn writes about David Hume’s theory that there’s no such thing as a continuous self, how he “believed that the self was a meaningless abstraction we impose on a collection of unconnected impressions.” I worry that I am getting dangerously close to agreeing with Nick Carraway in the beginning of The Great Gatsby when he says that personality is “nothing but an unbroken series of successful gestures.” Or will I be—have I been—centered all along by a secret belief that there is some controlling force that keeps us tethered, a force that makes multiplicity a path to unity, that renders everything bigger, more connected, than it appears?
And who have I been talking to all this time, anyway? Is you some ideal reader? Is you plural, a whole unseen community? Is you that great You up in the sky? Or is you, when it’s all said and done, just another way of writing me?
