The Re-invented Self
By Nancy Weber
The self is the river into which we most surely cannot step twice. Yet whether it hums peaceably between its banks or rises up in roiling destruction, it is the same very river — unmistakable, irreducible, something like imperishable, until it isn’t.
In the early 1970s, my own early thirties, I designed an experiment meant to prove that each of us was selves, not a self. I put an ad in The Village Voice offering to exchange my existence, the all of it, with another woman’s. I knew I would write a book about the experience, and I did — The Life Swap; but writing a book was an offshoot, not the object, of the adventures and misadventures that ensued.
My mother wrote instructions when I was born: “This, above all: to thine own self be true.” For me, being true to myself meant this above all: proving that I had no self. Of the great freedoms we fought for in the Seventies, none seemed more precious to me than the right to self-determination. Discovery was only the driveway; invention was the wide-open road to becoming.
I was moved equally by the dark mystery of my grandmother’s disappearance into Alzheimer’s. The heart of the torture was that she remained so very much herself even as she vanished. She didn’t recognize me as her 16-year-old granddaughter, but — still the embodiment of love, devoted to everyone’s happiness — she tried to fix me up with the cute young doctor working her unit. So I became obsessed with the question of what would remain when the most severe dislocation occurred.
Black Like Me has long been one of my bibles. White journalist John Howard Griffen darkened his skin in 1959 to live as black man in the segregated American South. Never out of print lo these decades, the book seems as breathtakingly bold and necessary today as when it first appeared. Beyond the lessons about race, he slays me with his tortured hunger to experience otherness and then to obliterate the idea of otherness — to be an alchemist; to morph; to find the black man within.
In 2006, Norah Vincent disguised her gender for a year and produced the chronicle Self-Made Man. She’s witty, sharp, elegant; but she’s a tourist who writes her postcards before she leaves home. Griffen needs to suffer the pain of discrimination — the prince who would be a pauper; Vincent wants to observe discrimination to affirm her superior stuff.
Griffen and Vincent chose their temporary new selves. In Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, winner of the National Book Award this year, transformation is an accident on a dark Nebraska highway, a terrible truck accident that delivers a life-changing blow to the head of 27-year-old Mark Schluter. He develops Capgras syndrome; he is convinced, against a torrent of evidence, that his sister, Karin, has been replaced by an imposter. Harrowing scenes, tense enough for any thriller, alternate with meditations on mind and brain, particularly as filtered through Gerald Weber, a doctor whose popular books on the wrinkles in consciousness seem designed to evoke Oliver Sachs. Powers writes so richly, he makes me feel the way I sometimes do in a spice shop; the confluence overwhelms me, I grow deaf in the nose, I have to go outside for fresh air before I can tell the words apart.
An accident changes everything in And There Was Light, but this wildly moving autobiography is the mirror opposite of Powers’s novel. Blinded at age eight, Jacques Lusseyran isn’t so much deprived of sight as liberated from its constraints. Light and color bathe his mind. The furniture in the room describes itself to him. Music invades him. “To make the mind work, only the mind is needed,” he says, writing of his ability, first to compute with Braille-embossed cubes and then, quickly, to dispense with the cubes. His gift for reading people is so finely wrought that he becomes a key recruiter for the Resistance when Charles de Gaulle calls on France to rise up against the German invader and the false French government. Recently re-issued in a delicate translation by Elizabeth R. Cameron, the book defies any attempt to classify it as merely inspirational. In our new round of religious wars, God’s reputation has sustained a number of hits, but even the most deity-phobic atheist is in danger of being moved by Lusseyran’s re-invented self. How little we sighted see!
At my favorite neighborhood bookshop, 192 Books (Tenth Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets), I lucked on a beautiful new British paperback edition of Mary Shelley’s Transformation, first published in 1831 and not otherwise easy to find. The spooky bare trees on the cover set the Gothic tone of the fable recounting the woes of Guido, a Genoese whose profligate ways bring him to ruin and lose him the hand of fair Juliet. A magician as vile to gaze on as Guido is gorgeous offers to change bodies with him for three days so Guido can regain what he has thrown away. Of course the gargoyle tries to make off with Juliet and renege on the deal. Perhaps if I had read this cautionary tale, I would have thought twice before swapping skins with a stranger. Not a gargoyle, my Micki, and in all too much of a hurry to reclaim her life and throw mine back at me; but the lesson stands. Re-inventing one’s life is not a tango.
The ads in They Call Me Naughty Lola are so clearly designed to entertain as well as provoke romantic thoughts, they make the American reader of personals desperate with envy. Oh, that casual British literacy! “Blah, blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write. Box No. 3253. Like I care.” “Mid-fifties man. Recently discovered guilt. Can’t wait to try it out. Box No. 7297.” Behind each ad one sees a juggler tossing selves into the air, the actual and the possible. Which one is worth the investment? Which one best to send out to shill for the shy ones?
As an anodyne to big-birthday blues, far better (to my taste) to synthesize or try on selves with such an ad than to follow the workbook exercises in Coming of Age…All Over Again. Klimo and Shutt are clearly kind-hearted souls who want to ease the pain of large numbers. But if there’s an unobvious thought in their manual, it hid itself from me. “Drink water.” “Don’t smoke.” “Practice patience.” Avoid the unsavory phrase “senior moments” by calling them “memory time-outs.”
If we are to re-invent ourselves as old, we had better begin by fearlessly embracing the word, as Lusseyran embraces “blind.” What’s this “midlife” nonsense on the cover of a book addressed to women in their 50s and 60s? I’d like to think I’m only halfway home, but it’s going to more than eight daily glasses of water, unless they toss some way terrific stuff into the Croton reservoir.
The Life Swap, originally published by Dial, has been reissued by iuniverse and is widely available online. Ms. Weber’s new novel The Gift of Evil is being serialized on Amazon Shorts (www.amazon.com).
And There Was Light
Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance
Parabola Books
Black Like Me
By John Howard Griffen
New American Library
Self-Made Man
By Norah Vincent
Viking
The Echo Maker
By Richard Powers
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
They Call Me Naughty Lola
Personal ads from the London Review of Books
Edited by David Rose
Scribner
Coming of Age … All Over Again: The Ultimate Midlife Handbook
By Kate Klimo and Buffy Shutt
Springboard Press
Transformation
By Mary Shelley
Hesperus Classics
