Another in an occasional series of posts about being human.
I am large, I contain multitudes. — Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”
Having many selves is one of the most human things people do, and one of the most fascinating. I was reminded again of this by a quotation that Karina posted a while back. Here’s a part of it:
A self is deciduous, it leafs out as one grows, changes with oneâs seasons, yet somehow stays briskly the same. The brain composes a self-portrait from a confetti of facts and sensations, and as pieces are added or removed the likeness changes, though the sense of unity remains, thanks to well-furnished illusions. We need illusion to feel true. A medley of different selves accompanies us everywhere. Some are lovable, some weird, some disapproving of each other, some childish or adult. Unless the selves drift too far apart, that solo ensemble works fine and copes well with novel events. As the psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg writes in Standing in the Spaces: âhealth is not integration. Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about — the capacity to feel like one self while being many.â
— Diane Ackerman, from An Alchemy of Mind
So many doors fling themselves open in my mind and spirit when I read that. The book is here on my desk, waiting to be read in whole, and I can only imagine what treasures await me!
But in the meantime, here is what Ackerman and Bromberg are talking about: from the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian. These are beautiful books, stuffed full of humanity. I think O’Brian is possibly the best writer I’ve ever read at expressing the inner multitudes of characters. This series of 21 books traces a decades-long friendship between Jack Aubrey, sea captain in the 18th-century British Navy, and Stephen Maturin, physician and British spy. They’ve spent more time together at sea than they have with their wives and families. They talk often, deeply, intimately together throughout these books. And it’s one of their long-standing customs to play the violin together at every opportunity. Music is also a daily conversation between them.
Jack and Stephen are men by every measure of their time — they are mainstream in gender presentation and sexual expression, culturally entitled, unafraid of physical hardship and stoic about bodily suffering, fully engaged with their culture’s notions of honor and bravery that “real men” were assumed to embrace without question. And at the same time O’Brian gives us two people who deeply love each other, who share the secrets of their hearts with trust, who are unafraid of the sentimentality that occasionally rises between them. It’s a magnificent demonstration of how to write gendered characters without assuming that gender limits their ability to be human, to feel and yearn and wonder and love as humans do.
In one of the earlier books, Stephen is tortured and his hands are badly damaged. In this scene, many books and many years later, Stephen is visiting Jack at his estate.
Stephen had been put to sleep in his usual room, far from children and noise, away in that corner of the house which looked down to the orchard and the bowling-green, and in spite of his long absence it was so familiar to him that when he woke about three he made his way to the window almost as quickly as if dawn had already broken, opened it and walked out on to the balcony. The moon had set: there was barely a star to be seen. The still air was delightfully fresh with falling dew, and a late nightingale, in indifferent voice, was uttering a routine jug-jug far down in Jack’s plantation; closer at hand, and more agreeable by far, nightjars churred in the orchard, two of them, or perhaps three, the sound rising and falling, intertwining so that the source could not be made out for sure. There were few birds he preferred to nightjars, but it was not they that had brought him out of bed: he stood leaning on the balcony rail and presently Jack Aubrey, in a summer-house by the bowling-green, began again, playing very gently in the darkness, improvising wholly for himself, dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years.
Like many other sailors Jack Aubrey had long dreamed of lying in his warm bed all night long; yet although he could now do so with a clear conscience he often rose at unChristian hours, particularly if he were moved by strong emotion, and crept from his bedroom in a watch-coat, to walk about the house or into the stables or to pace the bowling-green. Sometimes he took his fiddle with him. He was in fact a better player than Stephen, and now that he was using his precious Guarnieri rather than a robust sea-going fiddle the difference was still more evident: but the Guarnieri did not account for the whole of it, nor anything like. Jack certainly concealed his excellence when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen’s mediocre level: this had become perfectly clear when Stephen’s hands were at last recovered from the thumbscrews and other implements applied by French counterintelligence officers in Minorca; but on reflexion Stephen thought it had been the case much earlier, since quite apart from his delicacy at that period, Jack hated showing away.
Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating.
— from The Commodore by Patrick O’Brian (Book 17 of the Aubrey/Maturin series)
I hope someday that I can say so much about this essential human thing, this multiplicity of self that we all manage every day, sometimes with grace and wit, sometimes with struggle and bitterness, sometimes with confusion, sometimes with joy… I hope someday that I can so simply and so elegantly write of this as O’Brian has here.
