I spend a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be another person; sometimes a certain person, often just another person per se. I'm happy to be who I am, but all the same, I'd like to know what it means that there are all these other people. Why do they have habits and tastes that are different from mine? What are their thoughts, and how do they think them? Why do other people consider something to be good when I don't, and is there any ultimate meaning in this difference? I think my anxiety and constant confusion about the creative process has the same source as these questions. What is the state of an artist in the moment of creation? What makes another person say things I don't say, and do things I don't do?
This thought often turns into an attempt to understand personality. Laying aside the question of the origin of different personalities, which is enough trouble, I want to know what a personality even is, and just how they differ from one another. Do people with different personalities have different feelings and thoughts? Is the bearer of a different personality really different from me, or similar in some crucial way? Do they have a different consciousness? What experiences of life do other people have, and would I recognize them if they could somehow be presented to me?
More than I want to get to know other people in the convntional sense of that phrase, I want to know other people absolutely, the same way I know myself. I don't want to use this knowledge, as is implyed to me by the phrase "get into someone else's head", although I often use the urge as an impetus in fiction writing. The conception doesn't appeal to me for the purpose of greater compassion for others, although I am often lacking in compassion. I just want to know. I feel as though this knowledge would bring me a sense of completion and satisfaction beyond anything else I have experienced. When I dream, I think I get something of it, and that may be one of the reasons I like sleeping as much as I do.
I don't know if what I'm describing is unique, or even uncommon. I have rarely seen this feeling expressed, and yet I doubt that it is special in me. If anyone would like to join me, please let me know. I'm open to a meeting of minds.
2 comments:
The questions in your second paragraph seem to turn on the question of what we are when we are conscious: feeling? thought? perception? A sometimes frayed, sometimes flowing combination combination of these things, I suppose--giving us an initial conceptual framework for the notion of a sort of radical, unrepeatable privacy inhering in the experience of the 'I.'
I tend to believe in this notion, but it can get metaphysically alienating right quick, and one should keep handy the caveat that what we can share--what is NOT private--is, um, quite a lot.
Hence one consolation of, say, literature, where what is said, and the fact that it can be, is a bulwark against isolation.
The problem gets more acute, though, when we think about music. How can you not love Bach, Greg? (Or even just listen to it and think, "this moves me in a way inherently superior to the crude shoves that Stereolab makes at my soul"?) This gulf between us is not a conceptual dispute or one of cultural politics. It is deeper and more troubling; it is the one you speak of in this entry.
Is the dream a state like entering another consciousness, or is it more the marked and freeing loss of self-consciousness (and the marvelous content) within the dream that makes it so compelling for you?
We have to lose our selves to get them back, I think. This is true in a variety of degrees--it doesn't have to be 'religious.' For example, the idea that failure to learn is often simply a resistance to change in the self is an interesting one. Change in the self can be dangerous when taken too far, leading to instability--just like too much learning. The self as a system has a great balance to strike: between stability and the need for action implied by the fact that it is itself a radically self-insufficient system.
Sometimes i experience cognitive dissonance by thinking about things like this. I mean, I'm me. And I know I have thoughts about the world. But then i look at other people and think to myself, "my god they are having their own thoughts. they see things in totally different ways. They've had totally different experiences than I have!"
It's like, whoa, you mean my view of the world isn't wholly valid? Other views of the world exist? My mind tells me that what I know is reality, but if other poeple know stuff I don't, what do I really know ? Not a hell of a lot.
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