Take Walcott's phrase "Insomniac since four" from his poem 'Nearing Forty'. "Insomniac" is too polysyllabic and too psychologically objective for a four-year old to grasp. Yet Walcott's narrating self, nearing forty years old, can only understand the word 'Insomniac' through the identity in himself, his own repeated experience of the non-repetition of sleep, of that four-year old agency.
Thus, we can only understand our present experience as a constantly moving portrait. This portrait is tinctured and textured with the emotional fabric of the past, and modifying itself as it assimilates new sensory awareness and new fields of information.
Moreover, it can only ever be represented through the means at hand (and the understanding at head!). Laura takes a snap that encapsulates a party's zing. Madeleine paints, burrowed in her bedroom, with a Blakean intensity of colour that will one day inform her photographic portfolio. Karys swivels between retro and black-and-white filters to frame atmospheric vistas that leave the human aura in tact. At times, their eyes see the world as it would appear in their cameras.
And their memory is a little fresher.
And that is only one of many means.
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Most of us are unaware of how complex this process is. I'll illustrate with some paragraphs I wrote at uni on the mutual influence of Coleridge and Wordsworth:
Coleridge's mode of uniting and separating ego contemplans (mere self-consciousness, the fact of “personal identity” (Literaria Biographia, chapter 4)) from ego contemplatus (the visual image, object or form we imagine to represent our past selves) would inform Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey.’[1] In the central section of the poem (ll. 66-80), Wordsworth reflects on the absence or repression of self-consciousness that occurred to him five years prior. With the present tense “hope”, the reader is left in suspense as to what the word “hope” applies to. It is a retrospect much like Coleridge’s “hot-fair day”, but it is one which illuminates why Wordsworth sees it as central to his survival as “a man” not to “doubt” that “in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” Five years prior, Marat was executed, the Bastille was stormed and Wordsworth may have been in France; it was a disorientating experience. In contrast with definite nature (“the sides…the deep…the mountains”), he is uncertain what he was analogous to (“a roe…a man…one”; reinforced later by “I cannot paint / What then I was”). His former self was impelled by “dread” so powerful that this sentence has no main clause; the relativity of perception is underscored; the motives and determination of Wordsworth as ‘man’ were and are obscure like a “sounding cataract”. In Wordsworth’s application of language, separating ego contemplans from ego contemplatus entails a radical uncertainty about the category of ‘man’, even ‘Wordsworth’ as man.
The obscurity of man to himself had been central to debates about the course of the French Revolution from 1788 onwards. Rousseau emphasises a primal self that needed to be recovered from the mystification of social conditions, leading to the French Revolution. Burke appealed to history, arguing for innate “prejudice” and “habit”, even what motivates isolated monks and other “inferior classes” to experience unnecessary suffering, as a healthy corrective to the abstract impracticality of the Revolutionary self. Godwin asserted the progressive triumph of reason over the ‘false consciousness’ (to use an anachronism) of ‘prejudice’. Malthus had restored a Burkean sense of ‘inferior’ man who needed to be educated out of his prejudices to keep the political economy healthy, or be destroyed.
In The 1805 Prelude (and prospectively The Recluse), Wordsworth offers his own version of man’s liberation from his obscurity to himself. Where his predecessors had classed or de-classed types of men, he offered a context-dependent (or to forge a neologism, a memory-dependent) model of human nature, where man must reflect and clarify the classes of his previous sense-experience; only through this movement can he escape the twin-errors of “prejudice” and abstraction.
[1] “ego contemplatus…the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed” (Biographia Literaria, chapter 4. Qted in Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),138; Leader reads this discussion of the Irish bull as clear evidence that Coleridge thinks we make or create our images of ourselves in memory, so that he can show that for Coleridge publication was an important factor in the creation of a coherent self.
The obscurity of man to himself had been central to debates about the course of the French Revolution from 1788 onwards. Rousseau emphasises a primal self that needed to be recovered from the mystification of social conditions, leading to the French Revolution. Burke appealed to history, arguing for innate “prejudice” and “habit”, even what motivates isolated monks and other “inferior classes” to experience unnecessary suffering, as a healthy corrective to the abstract impracticality of the Revolutionary self. Godwin asserted the progressive triumph of reason over the ‘false consciousness’ (to use an anachronism) of ‘prejudice’. Malthus had restored a Burkean sense of ‘inferior’ man who needed to be educated out of his prejudices to keep the political economy healthy, or be destroyed.
In The 1805 Prelude (and prospectively The Recluse), Wordsworth offers his own version of man’s liberation from his obscurity to himself. Where his predecessors had classed or de-classed types of men, he offered a context-dependent (or to forge a neologism, a memory-dependent) model of human nature, where man must reflect and clarify the classes of his previous sense-experience; only through this movement can he escape the twin-errors of “prejudice” and abstraction.
[1] “ego contemplatus…the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed” (Biographia Literaria, chapter 4. Qted in Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),138; Leader reads this discussion of the Irish bull as clear evidence that Coleridge thinks we make or create our images of ourselves in memory, so that he can show that for Coleridge publication was an important factor in the creation of a coherent self.
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Lastly, I might relate all this to the movie I saw tonight: F. W. Murnau's delightful The Last Laugh. It is a tragedy tinged and framed with delirious comedy. An Walrus-bearded old man (the magnificently expressive Emil Jannings) loses his prized position as a hotel doorman, has a drunken party in his flat where it is assumed he is still a porter (dazzlingly shot with his Point of View, blurred and experimentally shifting) and is forced to be a bathroom wash attendant. These are intercut with flashbacks, which lurch towards the surreal as he gets drunker and drunker, capturing how the present purgatory sets in relief the gleaming pride of his former self. Murnau captures the buzz and exteriority of the city through that simplicity of expression that was perhaps only available in the silent era. As one critic put it, he "set down the first form of the cinema: the simple universal theme without complexity of narrative details. And it realised, as well as articulated in intention, the principle of constructed environment converging upon the character in relief." (Harry Potamkin) 'Relief' is an appropriate word for Murnau's dreamy poetic artistry. He sculpts in film. He creates a constantly moving, three-dimensional portrait of a life without means of colour and without means of word.
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