Conjure a figure in mind, their presence registered as a push or pull on another.
Today, feeding forward the distilled idea of the last five prompts*—that an “I” is something we can only know through relationship with another, and that this relationship is only describable with the language and customs we hold in common—take a panoramic portrait of your figure. Conjure them as the hub of a wheel, each spoke the reciprocal space of a different relationship. Each spoke opening a different space of possibility for your figure to understand themselves.
Write a short piece as a holding place for this panoramic presence that combines portrait and text.
*A compilation of the pith of the first five considerations:
Consider the idea that one can only tell one’s life story to another. That there is no understanding an “I” outside of being addressed by another. Consider further that this situation—of being addressed and addressing ourselves in turn—structures the story of ourselves that we can tell and so the way we understand the question of who we are.
Consider the idea that no one can fully tell the story of who they are, not having been present at the scene of their beginnings, not having language for the early years, those beginnings anyway activated by and held in the actions of others, everyone in relation to someone else—we cannot ever fully narrate what brought us into being or draw a hard perimeter around our self-understanding of how we came to be who we are.
Consider the idea that we want to be recognized by others as singular beings—which we are, because we are each this and only this body—but we have to use the language and to some degree the norms and identities of the world we are born into in order to become recognizable to others. Do we risk illegibility (refusing the sense-making power of norms that come from beyond us, that did not begin with us and will not end when we end) or risk a loss of our singularity by speaking of ourselves, understanding ourselves, through these norms? When we make ourselves intelligible to others—make sense of ourselves to others—by choosing one form of logic from the array of available ideas (a contingent array that depends on when and where we are born and live), is there a cost?
What—beyond the face of another (whether present or projected)—creates the conditions for me to sustain the work of telling the story of who I am? What kind of holding makes it possible for me to answer deeply? What kind of call invites me to speak?
I am telling a story about myself, attempting to tell the truth. But the form of the story pulls me into its own needs: for pattern, for coherence, for continuity. This coherent, continuity-possessing heroine is someone I am imagining for myself, even as I tell about her. Perhaps this is an occasion for me to change my life, to become her. Have I ruined the truth of my own story by allowing this narrative self to charm me? If this narrative self isn’t entirely true, is there a different kind of truth that pushes through my telling when the seamlessness of my story is interrupted, perhaps by my own lack of knowledge about what makes me who I am, my beholdeness to a social world that extends far beyond me?
