Me First (and Last): Selfish Stories

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.”
— (From The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka)

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.” (From The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka).

In every other bed in town, we assume, men who bore the country on their bowed backs, and women who carried those men home from the bars and riversides woke to a day much like the one—full of people and smoke and the last ashes of the war. That morning, among all of them, only Gregor worried terribly about how he might make his six-legged way to work and back into the life that seemed so solid just yesterday.

Every night, each of us falls asleep with the certainty that he or she will awaken to the same self that led us to our beds the night before. And, seemingly, we do. Morning after morning brings reaffirmations and confirmations, and Gregor’s fate seems all the more absurd. Caressed by rosy-fingered dawns, we luxuriate in our sameness, step thoughtlessly into the morning feeling certain our essential selves have survived the night unchanged. After all, even Gregor, regardless of his cockroachiness and spindly feathered legs, still fretted over the same issues—his job, falling out of bed, the smell of vinegar, DDT.

Certainty of essence, if not form. Right?

At the end of her life, my mother spoke to me only of times past, imagined we had once been lovers, laid out her life in stages, and slowly pulled the curtain closed on each of them. She often smelled of urine, and her hair coiled like that of Medusa. Unable to look away, I watched as, one stone after another, she vanished. Each day a little less like the day before, much less like a year before, not at all who she had been for decades. 

We laughed, we ate, we sang, she died.

And along the way, she disassembled her self, razoring off a finger’s worth at a time. For her, no day began like the one before.

What is this thing that we take to bed with us each night? Does it sleep while we do? And why do most of us feel dead sure it will be there, unharmed and unchanged when we wake?

Selves give us purpose, a picture of the world, continuity, a sense of place and time. It gives us spaces to store memories, the past, the names of streets and friends, portraits, a sense of life. Sort of like Homer Simpson—after his daughter Lisa explained how bacon, ham, and pork chops all came from the same animal—once said of pigs: selves are wonderful, magical, animals. 

But just what are they and who gets one?

As an immunologist, I believe that every living thing has a sense of self—an inherent set of chemical skills for sorting self from not-self. Otherwise, if we were anything at all, we would be only eddies in the confines of a single gelatinous blob plugging up the drains in the floors of the oceans. 

But it’s more than simple segregation of the world into two parts—me/not me—isn’t it? I mean, even after his metamorphosis, most of what remained came from Gregor—didn’t it?

Human Selves

Before my mother’s death, using only naked-eye observations, I saw and heard June Perry Callahan (the concept) disintegrate. Her odor changed from azure to hot metal. Her sense of smell from curious to ineffectual. Her eyes from orchestral to sulfurous. And her thoughts, like rats’ tails, unsnarled themselves in ways only the mindless and selfless can conceive. 

Well before she died, she withered. Because she could no longer do it herself, the last full day the three of us spent together, my brother bathed my mother.

What was she before?

We bathed together until I was four, maybe five. She came to my first wedding, skipped my second. She cared for my children when I didn’t. She believed in a god, I think. She canned peaches, bottled tomatoes, hated the Dallas Cowboys. She occasionally threw things at people—for the most part, people she disliked.

Then, less. Stories mostly from decades ago told over and over, and along with the tales, self seeped out of her. Through most of it, near as I could tell, she never lost her chemical sense of who she was and wasn’t. But surely, at the very end, she must have, because, in that instant, bacteria leapt and took her lungs. In her grace, she showed me the front and back sides of self—one for survival, another for living.

My niece, Kris, shares her child, Mia, with my wife and me. Kris knows better, but she indulges us. Mia is three. She and I argue about the color purple.

“Purple,” me.

“Yeh-yo [yellow],” Mia.

“Purrrpulllll,”

“Yeh-yo.”

Mia has the deep-black Native-American hair of her father, the perfect Kewpie doll mouth of her mother, and the slightly tilted eyes of a porcelain China doll. Men will do almost anything to make this toddler smile. Behind her mother, she hides from me.

“Purrpull!”

“Yeh-yo!”

I don’t think Mia has a self, not yet anyway. One day, I watched as three women Willa Cather’s prairie might have spawned bathed Mia. Sudsed and scrubbed pink in a porcelain sink, she seemed a reflection of my mother, chemically aware, consciously absent. At the opposite ends of their lives, two semi-selves.

My wife, Gina, is sixty-three. A lot of men have done a lot of stuff to make her smile, as well. I work at it when I can. What I see as brown she sees as gray.

“I can’t find that brown parka of mine.”

“You mean that gray one?”

“No, I mean that brown one.”

“Gray.”

“Brown.”

I am confident Gina has a complete self. But I don’t think she was born that way. Some studies support the notion that we humans don’t begin life with a fully functional self. According to these researchers, for the first seven or eight months, babies cannot distinguish their selves from their mothers’ selves. Interestingly, at least to me, at about the same age, maternal immunity (passed from mother to fetus across the placenta) wanes and babies begin to take full responsibility for their chemical identity and the defense of self. Perhaps, we start this life as some of us end it—selfless.

So, when do we get one?

The United States Government does not grant validation of self until the die-for-your-country self you acquire at age 18. At that same age, Uncle Sam also believes if you so choose, you have sufficient self to begin killing yourself with tobacco. But you don’t achieve the kill-your-self-with-alcohol self until the age of 21. And, of course, states give you the kill-yourself-and-others-with-an-automobile self at age 16. It seems U.S. policy offers little insight into the question of the maturing self.

Most other human institutions have also come out pretty clearly on concepts of self. Many religions have ceremonies to welcome boys and girls into manhood and womanhood around age 12—near the age of sexual maturity/fertility. Confirmation for Catholic children, Kinaalda for Navajo girls, Quinceañera at age 15 for Latinas, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs for Jewish children. Similar ceremonies occur at age 20 in Japan and 21 in Australia and New Zealand. Different societal or institutional confirmations of selfhood—varying ages, traditions, and, no doubt, results.

In his novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding suggests that only societal restrictions, not biology, create civilized human selves from innately evil beings. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, civilized society and Victor’s failures ruined the innately good monster.

Under the heading of “self,” Merriam-Webster, seemingly speaking in tongues, offers the following:
a:  the entire person of an individual
b:  the realization or embodiment of an abstraction.” In fairness to Merriam-Webster, the United States Government and social institutions all must rely on words to make their points, and words are a bit like maggots: It is not always clear where they came from or what they may become in time.

Language fails to communicate many things: the color of a rose, the smell of a baby’s head, a wasp’s sting, the taste of a lemon, a woman at your ear whispering.  Then, we must resort to metaphor—and metaphors succeed only when the recipient has tasted something like a lemon, heard something like a whispered promise.  Words, all by themselves, are slippery little metaphors, especially nouns and verbs.

Everyone’s “tree” differs. For some, the tree acquires leaves and roots and connects earth to sky, for others, it’s peach pits and life cycles, or a grove of ponderosa pines holding a mountainside in place. 

Selves are like that—maggoty, slippery, metaphorical, hard to describe. Yet, every day, I meet people, and within seconds, I make decisions about the reality and character of their selves.

Two or three times a week, I cycle a nearby bike trail. That trail winds through old cottonwoods and willows beside the gently sloping sandbanks of the Cache la Poudre River. The sour smells of leaf rot and fertile waters. Crows always accompany me as do single-minded mothers wielding strollers. The trail ends in Bellvue, Colorado, about ten miles from my house. 

At least twice a month, on the section of the trail that connects Laporte and Bellvue, I encounter a bundle of claret rags riding a bike. The first time we met, it took me a moment to unscramble what I saw and create, from the streaming tatters, a woman’s blockish outline.

Where the wind parted the rags, her face looked like of one of Van Gogh’s potato eaters, creased from the years and the paths she’d ridden, slick with dirt. From the bags at the front and rear of her bike sprouted curious-looking bits of cloth and wood, metal, a hairbrush.

“Hello,” I said, just as I have said every time since.

In response, she may or may not glance in my direction. When she does, her eyes, black like fishes’, reflect nothing. Her creviced face, a stone. During our dozen or more encounters, no word has ever bubbled to her lips. Her pace never changes as she pedals past. The slow stabs of her breath our only exchange. Other than her locomotive-like uphill grind and wheeze, I sense no self in her. A being barely animating a shroud of rags. I call her Ruby.

Ruby reminds me my lack of defining words interferes not at all with my willingness to discriminate between the selved and the selfless. And, for reasons I couldn’t name, I don’t question my accuracy.

In my life, Rubys are rare, as are Mias. The same goes for comatose, demented, psychotic, and otherwise deranged persons. Most of the human bodies I encounter appear to house at least one self. Even though I cannot use words to explain what I mean by that. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography, I may not be able to define self, but I know one when I see one (I think). I am equally confident that my body is home to a self.

How come?

Me first.

And what about you?

I often watch others, mostly while something distracts them. Then, these people seem enough like me to imagine their experiences of life and self mirror mine. And if asked, they share stories like mine. Because of this, it feels reasonable to attribute selves to other people.

But what signs do I or we have to reassure ourselves of this?

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, proposes three levels of self: proto, core, and autobiographical.

Many species, he proposes, have proto and core selves—mostly brain stem stuff, with a dash of cortex (if they have one) thrown in. Autobiographical self, he says, is where humans excel along with, but better than, cetaceans, other primates, and “to a certain degree,” dogs. Autobiographical self, according to Damasio, is built on “past memories” (I thought all memories were of the past). “And memories of the plans we have made; It’s the lived past and the anticipated future.” That, he says, is where art, science, extended memory, reasoning, creativity, and language arise—things he believes are “not entirely set by our biology.” 

Thomas Nagel, in his book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, also argues things like consciousness, intentionality, and value differ inherently from the physical and chemical processes that move us forward each day. In other words, everyday human actions may depend on chemistry, but consciousness, intentionality, and value arise from something else, something not governed or entirely explicable in terms of traditional physics or chemistry.

Nagel also argues, as Damasio implies, that because of the pure subjectivity of perception and consciousness, the nature of this stuff is, by definition, inaccessible to objective scientific approaches.

Maybe.

Intuitively, it seems more straightforward than that. We each seem endowed with a biochemical or physiochemical sense of self, the sense of self that prevents us from becoming a lot of other living things, at least until we die.

And then there’s the self that makes me me and you you. Entirely reliant on biochemical self, but more of me and more of you. More narrative. Maybe this aspect of self corresponds to Damasio’s autobiographical self or Nagel’s scientifically unattainable self. Maybe not.

Regardless, that’s what we want to talk about, isn’t it?  What do I mean when I say me? Who else might I have been? How did I become me? What are the smallest essential pieces of this storm I call me? So, that’s where we’ll focus.

But first, I want to ask another question. Do only humans have selves?

Animal Selves

One night in Kansas, I ran from glow to glow beneath a stone-dark sky, netting fireflies then dropping them into a Mason jar my uncle had given me. I was maybe 6. As long as I could keep my eyes open, I stared at the bits of light beating themselves against the glass. Next morning, the flies had collected into heaps at the bottom of the jar. I took the corpses and jar to my uncle.

“What did you expect?” he asked gruffly.

“Something else,” I said, trying to hold back my tears.

“Like what?”

“Like lightning bugs,” I sputtered.

“Well, you killed them. They can’t live in a jar like that. No matter, though. There will be more tonight.”

Just like that.

A year or so later, in Utah, I snared lizards and exiled them to Mason jar terrariums complete with leaves, flies, grass. The lizards lasted longer than the flies, but eventually, they too succumbed. Next, it was beetles and turtles, then frogs and fish, a bird with a shattered wing, a red hen, a billion or so ants, and then there were the worms.

In a schoolroom, I had watched an expert (we were told) dissect a living earthworm. I stared as the worm’s aortic arches continued to pump blood. Saw the waves of peristalsis move along the intestine. The expert pointed out the worm’s brain and explained how if you removed it, the worm could not stop moving. Five hours later, still in awe of the lowly annelid, I grabbed a shovel and headed for my father’s strawberry garden where I knew worms could be found. For a week or more, I recreated the classroom experience, until I thought I knew all there was to know about earthworm anatomy and physiology. Collateral damage included: a dozen or more single-edged razor blades (to cut the worms open) a hundred or so pushpins (to hold the creature open), all of the paraffin I could find (to line the bottom of my dissecting pan), and of course, about a half a gross of earthworms.

It would be more than a decade before I began the real work of a biological scientist—killing things to figure out what made them live. But already, I was honing my skills and learning the trade.

My teachers approved, my parents approved, my sisters were revolted, and then came high school, formaldehyde, and my work among the long- and recently dead.

And all the while, no nun, no priest, no teaching assistant, no student, no professor, no graduate student had an issue with any of this. Neither did I.

But one day, when my brother and I buried our sister’s dead and frozen cat with its tail sticking rigidly up out of the ground, my mother was furious.

How could I have so callously killed all those creatures?

At some point, scientist or not, aware of it or not, each of us takes a look at the range of animals and plants from what we call higher life forms (including us) to what we call lower life forms (not including us). Then, after nearly no consideration, we draw a line across that scale. Above the line: humans, horses, dogs, rabbits, lambs, so on. Below the line: spiders, slugs, mosquitoes, rats, armadillos, and pretty much all plants.  Something like that. The line separates what we give a damn about from the stuff we don’t imagine has a purposeful or useful experience of life. The location of the line varies from person to person, but we all draw that line. Most of us thoughtlessly crush mosquitoes. Few of us willingly mutilate dogs.

The line may move over time, but it never goes away.

Now, we have even written the line into laboratory law.

When I began doing research, you could do pretty much anything you wanted to any lab animal, mosquito, or chimp. Now, several countries have outlawed research on apes, and where I work, every research proposal that involves mammals or birds must pass strict internal review. A significant number fail. There is no review board for projects involving ants, beetles, beets, horseflies, or horseradish

To me, that line reflects our sense of brotherhood or commonality with other living things. Appearances count for a lot. So does evidence of intelligence. But I think the line also mirrors people’s thoughts about selves.

Some animals have them; others don’t.

Like I said, as an immunologist, on my list of the selfish, I have to make space for all living things. The existence of every one of us relies continuously on our abilities to distinguish self from not-self. The loss of that sense of self is terminal. That’s inarguable.

Still, the mere act of discriminating between what is self and what is not self does not seem adequate to account for the wonders of animals, especially human animals' skills and behaviors. For example, slug slime protects them, but slug poetry is awful, owls have mastered silent flight, but their carpentry fails in critical ways, and while peregrine falcons can see for miles, their paintings fail to convey a vision of any sort.

So, maybe before trying to define selves, we must face the possibility there are many sorts of selves. A curious idea, but how else can we explain our attitudes and observations of other animals and plants?

Where to begin with this more-than-just-biological sense of self?

Does one have to be self-aware to have a self?

It depends on what type of self we want to examine.

Grasshoppers likely have minimal, if any, leg-awareness, but that doesn’t stop them from jumping to many times their height and spitting on my arm. But maybe a lack of leg-awareness does explain why young boys pull the hind limbs off of grasshoppers to see what happens.

Some animal behaviorists have attempted to test for self-awareness. One such test is the mirror self-awareness test. The experiment goes something like this. Over time, the experimenter accustoms an animal to a mirror and a reflection of self. Then something changes. Often, the experimenter paints a red smear across the animal’s forehead. The mirror returns.  If, as it gazes upon itself in the mirror, the animal does nothing or reaches for the new spot on the mirror, the researcher concludes the animal has no awareness of itself as distinct from the mirror. If on the other hand, in response to the change in the mirror, the animal reaches toward its own forehead, the animal qualifies for self-awareness.

Simple.

By about 18 months, humans can pass this test. Adult chimps pass, bonobos pass, orangutans pass, some monkeys pass, bottle-nose dolphins, Asian elephants, Orcas, Eurasian magpies, and some ants pass. Ants? Gorillas usually fail. Conclusion: gorillas lack self-awareness.

But . . .

What if gorillas glance in the mirror and think to themselves: “Damn, I look pretty fine with that red spot on my forehead. Think I’ll leave it there.”

Tests are hard.

What about awareness of others—not-self awareness?

There is an interesting test that psychologists use as evidence of reaching a critical stage in mental development. It is sometimes called a false-belief test.

In this test, an investigator shows a child a video. In the video, two boys sit in a room together. One child plays with a train. The other asks to play with the train, but the train operator refuses and pushes the train under his bed. He then leaves the room. The remaining child takes the train from under the bed, plays with it briefly, then, as the other boy approaches, hides the train in a toy chest.

The end.

Afterward, the investigator asks the experimental subject something like: “After he returns to the room, where will the boy look for the train?”

Children under 4 years of age will invariably say something like: “The boy will look inside the toy chest.” After age 4, children correctly answer that the boy will look under his bed for the train. Apparently, before age 4, kids cannot understand other minds exist and that those minds may not know things they know—like the fact someone moved the train. According to several theories of mind, children cannot have thoughts about these sorts of events until their vocabularies include words about thinking and knowing.

Adult chimpanzees pass this test as readily as 4- or 5-year-old humans

Some elephants, likely with a bit of help from people, can paint their self-portraits. My miniature schnauzer Nutmeg knows, within 15 minutes, the time for dinner.

Some religions deny animal selves, while other sects see them everywhere.  There is a particular convenience to denying animal selves. It allows for unrestricted research, unregulated animal husbandry, and undoubtedly salves the minds of some who hunt or fish. But the research data don’t fit well with the Cartesian concept of selves as uniquely human. Furthermore, Rene’s ideas don’t make much sense to most pet and livestock owners.

And what about those ants and their mirrors?

According to Marie-Claire and Roger Cammaerts at the Université Libre de Bruxelles:
In front of a mirror, and consequently of their reflection view, ants behaved otherwise than when in front of nestmates seen through a glass. Seeing nestmates through a glass, ants behaved as usual, i.e. without taking close notice of them. In front of a mirror, they rapidly moved their head and antennae, to the right and the left, touched the mirror, went away from it and stopped, cleaning then sometimes their legs and antennae. As long as they could not see themselves in a mirror, ants with a blue dot painted on their clypeus did not try to remove it. Set in front of a mirror, ants with such a blue dot on their clypeus tried to clean themselves, while ants with a brown painted dot—of the same color as that of their cuticle—on their clypeus and ants with a blue dot on their occiput did not clean themselves. Very young ants did not present such behavior.

Ants have selves. And, seemingly, a sense of individual self and communal self. After all, nobody directs the endeavors of ants. Still, ants build elaborate homes, nurture their young, defend their turf, rescue their fallen comrades, perform very different roles under different sets of circumstances, and well, a lot of other things essential for ant-community survival. On top of that, individual ants like looking at themselves in mirrors.  Two images of me: “I” and “we.”

What about ant stories? Chemicals, maybe? Then what? How do we decide what constitutes a self, who has one, and what we should do about those selves, including cockroaches? As Grete, Gregor’s sister, did with Gregor (at first anyway), perhaps we should err on the side of caution and show a little kindness.

Multiphrenic Selves

In his book, The Saturated Self, Kenneth Gergen coined the word “multiphrenia.” He used this word to describe the effects of current information flow and social media in creating the sense that our bodies contain many selves: one for me (maybe), one for Facebook, one for school, one for the office, one for Snapchat, one for church, and on and on. Not a disorder so much as a consequence of trying to survive in an ocean of interactions. A fragmentation of self.  Phrenia comes from the Greek for “mind.” I’ve felt this often, but is there more to it than the frazzled fragment of a coherent persona at a burnt-out day’s end? Can one body house more than one self?  Dissociative identity disorder or DID (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) seems to describe just this sort of situation. But even psychologists and psychiatrists cannot agree about the reality of DID or its consequences, and one self per one person seems fundamental and integral to humanity. But where do selves reside

Nesting Habits of Selves

Selves make their homes inside of brains, right? In or around 1849, Phineas Gage made his infamous way into American lore. As the story goes, Phineas ran a railroad construction gang. The gang worked to remove rock to clear the way for rail beds. Likely due to the illness of one Chinese or Irish crew member, Phineas had to pick up a tamping rod. Then, as per standard procedure, a crew member drilled a hole in the bedrock, poured in black powder, added a fuse, but maybe failed to add the required sand on top of the powder.

Phineas lifted his 3/4-inch round, six-foot-long tamping rod intending to pack the sand along with the powder beneath before lighting the fuse and running like hell. The rod struck rock and spit out a blue-fire spark that set off the gunpowder. The blast blew Phineas’ rod beneath his left cheekbone, behind his eye, through his left frontal lobe, and clean out the top of his head. The rod landed some ninety feet from Phineas. Phineas would never be quite the same again. After years of faithful service, the railroad finally had to discharge Phineas (no pun intended) because of his newly acquired reprobate ways and generally bad manners.

After having a hole punched in his brain, Phineas was no longer Phineas. Conclusion: Whatever it was that made Phineas Phineas resided in his brain tissues.

Right?

Maybe not.

Suppose you were listening to a radio, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was performing Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. As an experiment, about 6.5 minutes in, just as those winds start the long movement in G-sharp minor, you hammer a nine-inch nail through your radio. The symphony stops, winds, or no winds. Now, do you conclude that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had been hiding inside the radio and was now mostly dead from your nine-inch nail?

Experiments with televisions, computers, or smartphones will yield very similar results.  Each piece of electronics is essential for the sound, picture, voice, whatever to manifest, but none contains the source of that picture, music, or voice.

Because of this sort of potential for error, I will not attempt to locate selves inside of bodies. As of now, at least, it doesn’t seem worthwhile or likely to offer any significant insight. Me? I think all the parts matter.

Unnatural History of Selves

Our modern Western concept of self seems intuitively obvious. So much so, most of us doubt this concept has changed over time or that, even now, it differs among cultures.

In his remarkable book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (much better than the title would suggest), Julian Jaynes offers some compelling evidence from Homer's poetry and the history of art, that our ancestors did not view selves as we do.

Ancient Greeks, it seems, believed that the gods directed human actions. Take Homer’s description of a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. On their way to wage war with Troy, Agamemnon and Achilles subdue a much smaller nation. As a reward for this minor conquest, both acquired mistresses. The woman Agamemnon had stolen happened to be the daughter of a priest. As it turns out, the priest had a bit of an in with Apollo who, in punishment, rained arrows on the Greeks. To save his men, Agamemnon frees his mistress. But, to feed his bruised pride, he swipes the woman Achilles has taken. In response, Achilles confronts Agamemnon about his theft, a deed of no small consequence. To which, Agamemnon replies: Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus, and my portion, and the Erinyes who walk in darkness: they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles' prize from him, so what could I do? Gods always have their way.

Achilles basically says: “Oh..., OK,” and forgives Agamemnon's purloinery. Today, between warriors such as those, other outcomes seem more probable. The selves we now attribute to humans seem very different from the selves of ancient Greece. Those selves included the gods themselves. But, as Jaynes says, one hundred, or so, years later, Odysseus and his men follow their own wishes and desires.

Today, several studies indicate that we and our selves, continue to evolve. For example, one thorough report suggests since the Middle Ages, human focus has shifted dramatically from the value of the group to the importance of the individual. In support of this, the authors point to the following:
1. Increasing importance of autobiographies
2. Proliferation of family portraits and self-portraits
3. Growing popularity of mirrors
4. Recognition of the importance of childhood to the development of personality
5. The adoption of individualizing chairs rather than benches
6. Increasingly private and specialized rooms in the house
7. More introspective drama and literature
8. The development of psychoanalysis
Others have described how, at the same time, especially among aboriginal peoples, the idea of an individual self, beyond the tribal concept of self, basically doesn’t exist. That complicates things. If we mapped the world by concepts of self (as with narratives), the resulting mosaic might stretch our minds about the inherent nature of human selves.  All of which clouds the issue of just whose self we might explore. For now, I will try to stick with subjects I believe I know something about, like me and you and cockroaches.

Me Last

Complicated for sure. But, on a daily basis, I don’t behave as though multiple “mes” fight for dominance. I act as though I am a single, internally complete, temporally stable unit. Anything else just further entangles things; I cannot do otherwise. At once, part of me believes in multiple mes, while another is confident of the unity of my me. Most times, unity-me prevails. As Billy Shears wrote:
“What do you see when you turn out the light?
I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.”

Nor do I regularly contemplate the self as perceived by the tribespeople of Papua New Guinea or among the aboriginal peoples of Africa. Instead, to achieve a manageable sense of me, I think (when honesty catches me off guard), I have created a fictional angst-sparing narrative about the nature of my self and my world. More than any other single piece of flesh, that narrative defines me.

Ask me who I am, and using words, I will tell you a tale (selected from among thousands in my library) that spans 70 years—a tale rotten with distorted facts, misrecollections, unattributed appropriations, wishful thinking, and subversive misdirection. But factual or not, among those stories lie the twisted roots of me. We are our stories, those dust devils of words that swirl about us and create us. After all, what demonstrably disappears as we die? Not any of the atoms that made us what we were. Not the water, not the proteins, not the genes, or the bacteria (not immediately anyway). All of the things that we believe are ultimately responsible for who we are remain well beyond the moments of our deaths.

Only our stories leave us immediately and forever, especially those stories that no one else knew.  And some of those stories must be pretty weighty. After all, way back in 1901, Duncan McDougal discovered that at the moment of death, a human body lost 21 grams. For me, the adjectives alone would account for that much grammage.