[ilds] Selected Fictions

[Marc Piel]

Perhaps you should look up Enneagram on Google.

Surely there is a difference in an "image" in a 
mirror and an image that one projects consciously 
or unconsciously to others. The image in the 
mirror can only fool oneself but not others 
whereas thae other image fools oneself and not the 
others.
Salutations
Marc

Bruce Redwine a écrit :
> Marc,
> 
> Dunno what's an "Enneargram."  But I see your main point about roles and 
> the way we play them.  What you say is undoubtedly true.  We all have 
> various social roles:  in my case, son, husband, father, friend, former 
> soldier, perennial student, etc.  That's a little like Justine in the 
> dressmaker's shop admiring herself in different mirrors and seeing 
> different views of the same person.  However, when Durrell starts 
> talking about the /self/ and its "many negatives" or when Pursewarden 
> makes pronouncements about lives and "selected fictions," then I think 
> they're referring to something far more basic.  Durrell is talking about 
> one's core identity, the "old stable ego," what you call the "true self" 
> -- all that having /no/ real or true identity.  Hence, the stress on 
> "fiction."  Being a father or a husband is no fiction, those are social 
> facts, but calling the "I" or the "self" a fiction is something else 
> again, something radically different.  All this is not new, but a 
> restatement or development of ideas central to Buddhism or touched upon 
> by some of the English Romantics.  Keats begins to explore this idea 
> when he talks about the "camelion poet" and "negative capability," i.e., 
> great artists being able to assume other identities because they live in 
> some state of suspended identity.  All admittedly not very clear, but 
> that's part of the appeal of the notion.  So, when someone says his core 
> self doesn't exist or is just multiple fictions, if he says that and 
> truly believes and demonstrates it, then I think that he's either a Zen 
> Buddhist who's reached some level of enlightenment or that he's showing 
> early signs of schizophrenia.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Bruce
> 
> 
> On Oct 3, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Marc Piel wrote:
> 
>> Thanks Bruce for your remarks.
>>
>> From the very first reading of the AQ I understood that most of the 
>> characters were either taken from or were hybrids of people that LD 
>> knew... for me it was all to true and possible to heva been totally 
>> invented. Also nearly all the personalities had their true self and 
>> their selected self.
>>
>> All these years later I think that is true of most people, and some 
>> even hjave selves posed onto them by their family, their way of making 
>> a living, or the context of their lives which often they can do 
>> nothing about. I don't think at all that that makes us all 
>> schizophrenic. "Selected" can be by us, for us and in spite of us. The 
>> whole structure of the AQ; the same story seen from the different 
>> points of view of the actors is temoignage of this. It is also LD's 
>> genious. Have you ever played the game where everyone is situated 
>> around in a circle and one person whispers a phrase to the next, who 
>> in turn repeats it to the next and so on... the phrase ends up 
>> completely transformed....
>>
>> Have you ever taken a look at the "Enneargram" ?
>>
>> Salutations,
>> Marc
>>
>> Bruce Redwine a écrit :
>>> Marc,
>>> Yes.  "Lives" or personalities as "selected fictions" would seem to 
>>> be one of Durrell's pet ideas.  In the poem "Alexandria," we have the 
>>> line, "As for me I now move / Through many negatives to what I am." 
>>>  "Negatives" is ambiguous, it could refer to negation or to 
>>> photography, but I usually take it to mean the latter, a photographic 
>>> image.  (Durrell liked photographs, how they momentarily captured a 
>>> bit of reality.  Cf. the scene in /Balthazar/ developed around a 
>>> photograph taken in Mnemjian's barber shop or the scene in /Justine/ 
>>> where Nessim appears behind a frosted glass door:  "He developed like 
>>> a print in a photographer's developing bowl.")  I'm sure more 
>>> examples of this idea, other variants, can be dug up throughout 
>>> Durrell's oeuvre.  The idea of the "unstable ego" gets developed in 
>>> chapter three of Durrell's /A Key to Modern Poetry/ (1952), which 
>>> begins by quoting D. H. Lawrence on the passing of the "old stable 
>>> ego."  Once Durrell establishes the basic human personality as 
>>> "unstable," i.e., fluid or unknowable, it's not a big leap to 
>>> believing in "selected fictions" or "multiple selves."  For me, being 
>>> a rather down-to-earth guy, this has never made much sense, and I 
>>> doubt if many psychiatrists would go along with Durrell's analysis. 
>>>  Isn't having "multiple personalities" part of the definition of 
>>> schizophrenia?  On the other hand, maybe Durrell was a little crazy, 
>>> that being part of his genius.  Look at the end of /Monsieur/ and all 
>>> those multiple levels of narration, all those "begats," all that 
>>> fragmentation -- the novel seems to be having a mental breakdown. 
>>>  Old Durrell, bless his heart, seems to be going off the deep end. 
>>>  And I think he sometimes did.
>>> Best,
>>> Bruce
>>> On Oct 2, 2009, at 3:54 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
>>>> Thank you Bruce for situating the citation. The
>>>> accompagning paragraphe explicites the meaning:
>>>>
>>>> "Our view of reality is conditioned by our
>>>> position in space and time--- not by our
>>>> personalities as we like to think. Thus every
>>>> interpretation of reality is based upon a unique
>>>> position. Two paces east or west and the whole
>>>> picture is changed.' Something of this order.....
>>>> And as for human characters, whether real or
>>>> invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche
>>>> is really an anthill of opposing pre-dispositions.
>>>> Personality as something with fixed attributes is
>>>> an illusion ----but a necesary illusion if we are
>>>> in love! (last five words in italics).
>>>>
>>>> Bruce, you must surely have a numeric version of
>>>> all this..... I am sure this idea was also said
>>>> elsewhere!
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> Marc
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Bruce Redwine a écrit :
>>>>> Marc,
>>>>>
>>>>> Good point.  "'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere, 'lives based upon
>>>>> selected fictions'" /(Balthazar,/ New York 1986, p. 14).  And Durrell
>>>>> and his alter ego weren't lying.
>>>>>
>>>>> Bruce
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Oct 1, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Surrely he summed it all up himself with the words
>>>>>> "we each live our selected fictions".
>>>>>> Marc (or was it "we all live our selected fictions"
>>>>>>
>