25-FEB-04: The third person
Last week Purple One of New Zealand mailed me to ask why Dave refers to himself in the third person. Never one to miss an opportunity for a blog topic I'm discussing it here.
At the most basic it's a kind of affectation in an attempt to make the site a bit more interesting - a house style if you like - like the three dots…
There's also a less flippant side in that I think it reflects the different personalities within me. You know how sometimes you observe yourself as if from the outside, well as the online Dave has written more and got feedback from people he has become slightly different from me. Part of this is living up to the implied expectation of the feedback and previous content. Dave is now (to a limited extent) public, thus doesn't define what he is himself, but is defined by his social context. This is obviously always true - you are a different person to everyone who knows you - and the way that you behave when around them reflects your understanding of their expectations.
I've also discovered that I am referring to myself in the third person in speech as well. I feel that this is because of the different states I can be in when performing different tasks. For example, I don't do the washing up, I think of how I could have handled a situation at work better, whilst Dave does the washing up.
By being able to present a consistent face to many people simultaneously (as one can on the web) I have realised that there are many Daves: the online Dave, the work Dave, the at home Dave, the out on the town Dave. However, I still feel contained within myself. I still feel as if I am internally consistent and an ongoing entity that develops and grows. If we observed Dave from the outside over time you and I would see that Dave is different things to different people, changes his accent depending on the class of his surroundings, affects habits to fit in, all the things that we do socially. Thus, Dave is not consistent at all as far as his identity is defined by his relationships with others.
I feel an article on identity brewing… Whilst it completes its fermentation, here is an amazing piece by Jorge Luis Borges. I first saw it in The Mind's I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, but got the text from here
"Borges and I" by Jorge Luis Borges
Original text is from Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp.246-47.
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
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