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An Introduction to the Ringmaster: 

I can’t remain too long in any consistent first person, otherwise you’ll end up believing that I’m really me, and then I’ll be pinned inanimately to the page and unable to shape-shift as any living creature must if it hopes to avoid the tarpits.

Consider Me the ringmaster for what follows. I am part of the performance, just another circus freak, not the kind of Self you’d bring home to meet your mother.

Let’s dare to suggest I’m not even a living thing so much as a material swelling of words, thoughts, ideas, pictures, emotions, the chaotic surface waves left by the spirit of life as it hovered over the keyboard for a moment before passing on to better things. After all, the screen or page you’re reading is not itself alive. Nor is this picture of “me” that hovers over the page momentarily.

Or say instead that this picture of “Me” is a mnemonic shell that formed where life once placed its fleeting and immaterial finger. I am the fossil of something more lively that passed this way.

Or maybe I’m the detritus of memory, a junk-encrusted tumbleweed of ideas of myself, a messy and clanging assemblage of cans and can’t-do’s, recoils, crossed-wires and lost marbles. This would explain why I’m such a noisy sonofabitch.

If this accumulated knot of certainties (which includes the certainties of self-doubts) — if this can’t disentangle itself and lose some of these old ways of thinking (by “expressing” them and leaving them exposed to irradiating perception), then this “I” itself switches metaphors a little and becomes a hardened blind spot rolling across the perceptual field like a giant floater, sticking to that lens with the glue of Literalism, a near-sighted conflation of image and reality, map and unmappable territory.

I am a cataract of perception, a necessary interpretive filter that has hardened into opaque blind spots held together by a too serious, too literal, too narrow narrative of who I am.

I can’t see these narratives easily, but I can hear the muted, repetitive clanging of “what is not possible”, which are the individual beads of self-definition, which are strung along these otherwise invisible narratives tangled hopelessly in the tumblejunk, the floater, the cataract of “who I think I am.”

Look, to speak of “myself” I must speak of another, I must hold this conception at arm’s length and analyze it, so that “I” am always an outsider, never the real deal.

And this failure to find “me” is a discovery of reality itself. I am learning that reality is larger than identity, which unchains the dogmatic First Person.

Now at last the “I” is free to shape shift, free to become an honest fiction and express the buried narratives in this twisted wreck of a rolling Self, which have obscured an immaterial essence far deeper than any single one of us.

I am now free to live and die the many selves that I’ve accumulated. I’m the rolling horde of a greedy, clinging dragon. Now it spills its messy metaphors, unraveling its own contradictions, unbecoming itself, and cleansing perception of its many conflated floaters.

As Beckett said, “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

Now I’m free to be a happy loser, to shed myself of all these blinding posers of personality. And this changes what remains of the tumblejunk of me.

And through this increasingly transparent self, I can see farther into our common core, and discover that we are the solar ejecta, the cooling, hardening, and then collapsing and recycling forms of the white-hot creative energy in the immaterial dynamo at the center of Being itself.

Not a bad way to spend eternity, living and dying, materializing and de-materializing, the beating heart of an ever-exploding universe.

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I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.

by Juan Ramón Jiménez