[ilds] Selected Fictions

[Bruce Redwine]

Ilyas,

I agree.  The selfs you list are developmental stages or social  
constructs.  We all have many "selfs" in this sense.  But these are  
not, I think, what Durrell and Lawrence and all the other theorizers  
of the human personality mean by the "old stable ego."  That "entity"  
exists below appearances and social conventions.  I also agree that  
Cambridge would have been a good experience for LD.  I can't see as  
bad any institution that challenges you to think and to defend your  
positions.  By the way, I wish I had one of Durrell's paintings.   
You're lucky.


Bruce


On Oct 3, 2009, at 2:04 PM, Ilyas wrote:

> Bruce, a number of thoughts occur to me on the back of your comments  
> below.
>
> Durrell had many selfs – even outside his writing. He was,  
> initially, a poet. His early work, including the precocious ballade  
> of slow decay written I think in the early 1930’s, is a fine example  
> of some signs of that “negative capability”. But durrell was a good  
> poet who showed promise, rather than a great poet. Who now remembers  
> his poetry as being the equal or even similar to Eliot, auden and  
> spender ? And then he was a painter, in fact I possess a couple of  
> his works. An interesting painter, but hardly notable, and one who  
> would not be collected (however lethargically) were it not for his  
> writing. And then he was a journalist, and a civil servant, and a  
> lover. Even a magazine editor. He was all these things, and these  
> personalities litter his later writings.
>
> I don’t mean, here, to suggest that he was good at many things, but  
> brilliant or exceptional at none (since I consider him a hugely  
> under-rated writer, and AQ as a truly great work), and therefore  
> somehow an apologist, through his fictive creations, for his  
> failings. But I do know that Oxbridge would have been the norm for  
> LD and many of his friends and colleagues, and I feel that he  
> carried the burden of failure more than he rejoiced at the freedom  
> thus gained by not spending time amongst those glittering spires.
>
>
> On 03/10/2009 20:44, "Bruce Redwine" <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>  
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>

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