This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Y — You and I

“The ‘I’ is detestable.” Arthur Rimbaud, who knew how to inspire both love and hate in equal degrees, also loved and hated himself, possibly to an even greater degree. The proclamation of his detestable ego is diametrically opposed to the love that we all feel for ourselves as we caress, admire, dress up, and deck ourselves out in that interior mirror that nearly all of us would wish to externalize, as the Italians do so magnificently in their cult of la bella figura and their steadfast belief in it. Many, many people cannot, will not, or do not dare emerge from that vanity of vanities, and this occurs because in this world there is both ugliness and imperfection, and the two know each other. There is also humility and even humiliation, and the two love each other as well.

The typical “I”—the ego, that little Argentinian we all carry inside us, as the old and rather unjust Latin American joke goes— can often manifest itself, beautiful and admiring, like a serious moral defect. It can be a psychic state that becomes an end in and of itself, excluding not only others but, in the end, the “I” itself— that is, personal virtue. Wrapped up in its own vanity, the “I” is the pygmy of existence. And it can very easily come to represent that part of ourselves in which we unwittingly deposit the things we most despise in other people. How easily the “I” turns against itself! The egotistical dwarf becomes gigantic, eventually turning into the vengeful monster of our own detestable selves.

The “I” can lose itself thinking that it exists in perfect, egotistical isolation. This means that the “I” tricks itself into thinking that it can exist without any need of what it already is. The Socratic “know thyself” is, in part, a commandment directed to our interior being, a challenge to the intelligence of that part of our interior selves that we sometimes lose amid egotism, complacency, and the mirror of vanity. But the Socratic invitation, in a broader sense, is a challenge that criticizes the “I” that does not have the courage to admit its defects, and exhorts the “I” to cultivate those defects that can only truly flourish within the framework of the “I.” Because even though the Earth existed before we did and will continue to exist long after we are gone, all that exists outside of us passes through us. The “I” filters, assimilates, reflects upon, and adds something to the world, but only because — detestable as it may be — it exists. It is there.

The “I” is the framework, if not of all reality, at least of one crucial aspect of reality without which it would have no stage upon which to act. Perhaps “I” is not the most honorable pronoun. But there is no “you” that does not come from or direct itself toward the “I,” nor is there a “you” and “I” that can be extricable from the “we.” Yet at the same time, can there be a “we” that expels the “I” and the “you” from its dangerous community without also becoming a perilous political abstraction?

The Stoics and Rousseau proposed a notion of the “I” as the citadel of the soul. “Do not let yourself be vanquished by anything but your soul,” said Seneca, native of Latin Córdoba. And the citizen of Geneva exclaimed: “Oh, virtue! To learn your laws is it not enough to retreat to our ‘I’?” Taken to its extreme, the protection of the “I” ’s intrinsic value abandons us in Pascal’s chair; Pascal, the man for whom “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” But perhaps the “I” can exhibit many of its merits from the Stoic citadel and from the Pascalian chair. For example, it can cherish all that remains of childhood. It can also nourish the imagination and exercise itself creatively.

Writing, painting, composing, thinking. These are all solitary occupations of the “I.” Only an oppressive dictatorship can look upon the solitude needed to write a poem and regard it as egotism and betrayal of solidarity, of which Stalin accused Anna Akhmatova. In the “I,” desires make themselves manifest, virtues are cultivated, and errors are redressed. At least part of the life force finds its roots in the “I,” which uses it for self-preservation. This is the indispensable side of egotism. To renounce self-preservation is to renounce the “I” in favor of another value that may be homeland, political conviction, love, justice. Our hope is that the sacrifice strengthens rather than annihilates our “I.” And moreover, when the “I” is strengthened, doesn’t it then ascend to a higher level, a place where it is free from the vices of egotism? Isn’t that the moment when the “I” becomes a person?

I already know that person, etymologically speaking, means mask. The mask of classical drama, nevertheless, was not invented to hide but rather “to sound,” per sonare. That is, to be heard. The “I” that is a person is conscious of himself because he is conscious of the world. The narcissistic “I” drowns itself in its mirror. The person rescues the “I” from agony, protecting and exhibiting the reservations that the egotistical “I” may not be aware of. Know thyself. The solitary “I” then becomes a person who can describe the evolution of his heart and his mind, how they nurture his imagination and passions. In this sense, the solitude of the creative individual is an illusion. What the individual writes, paints, composes, creates, imagines, possesses, is already the personal “I,” the “I” with attributes. The I am becomes inextricable from the why am I? and for what am I?

Knowing oneself, then, does not imply loving oneself.

As a stage of creation, the personal “I” can be heroic in its capacity to unleash the most powerful imagination. But it is also rattled by the equally powerful traditions of Romantic disorder (Byron) or post-Romantic disorder (Burroughs) as a condition of creation: the derangement of all the senses, to recall Rimbaud once again. Few and far between are the examples of this illusion of combustible creation, fueled by alcohol, sex, drugs, excess, that actually render lasting and fruitful results. Just as Pascal commanded, Flaubert eventually no longer left his house, Velázquez no longer moved from his court, Beethoven remained in his village, Kant changed neither the schedule nor the route of his daily walk. Balzac’s spirit for living needed no other vice than gluttony, women, and the 50,000 cups of coffee that killed him in the end. Cervantes, the model of restrained irony, spent time in jails and under bureaucracies that were in no way noble, and de Sade, the epitome of extreme disorder, also found himself obliged, in jails and madhouses, to imagine more than he could actually do in the real world. Shakespeare was too busy acting and managing theaters to be able to give his “I” more life than what he put into his writing, and for Dante not even the turbulent political scene in Florence could tear him away from a Commedia that takes place neither in Heaven nor Hell but rather at the midway point in the journey of life, in the dark jungle of one’s own “I.”. . And so there are no strict rules governing the creative “I.” Wordsworth is normality personified. His friend Coleridge, disorder. Baudelaire brings discipline and disorder together. Hugo eventually writes about how to be a good grandfather. Dickens, to his own chagrin, is a domestic animal, whereas Wilde transgresses domesticity, perhaps even to his own chagrin. The list of contrasts goes on and on, but the rule of creativity is still a strict one. It is called discipline. It is called knowing how to be alone. It is called framing the “I” in a projection that transcends the person.

The creative personality tells us that the worst sin known to the “I” is that of dispersing ourselves in banal occupations. And to go a bit further, that of working in a field that we dislike. The truly unfortunate “I” is he who fritters away his days in an occupation he detests and that, to make matters worse, he cannot abandon and unconsciously transforms into habit and eventually, inevitability. This category goes from the young restaurant waiter who takes no pains to hide the dissatisfaction he feels with his occupation, to the veteran waiter, who has resigned himself to the notion that serving customers is his destiny. In the middle of this category we find the happy waiter, proud of the service he provides, capable of attaching value and meaning to the fortune— not the misfortune — of contributing to the well-being of the world. The curmudgeon and the defeated soul generally find themselves in the Anglo-Saxon world, a world of bitter displacements and visible dissatisfaction. The individual who is proud of his work because he knows that all work is a worthy and creative pursuit is generally found in the Latin American and Mediterranean world. But the social location is the least important element in all this. The aristocrat who is venomous if poor, fainéant if rich, and disdainful in both cases has been displaced and replaced (and this is true almost anywhere in the world) by the businessman who can be generous, artless, and full of energy, or else sophisticated, miserable, and also, always, full of energy.

I speak from our own Faustian tradition; I do not concern myself with the Eastern spirituality that many of my friends understand and practice, mainly because I am unfamiliar with it. Perhaps, however, we do share the conviction that knowing oneself does not imply adoring oneself or possessing absolute truth, but rather implies the ability to live in accordance with a series of very basic guidelines regarding discipline, professional projects, and an understanding of how to operate in the world, whether alone or through the appreciation of friendship and love. Everything else is gone with the wind. Romantic heroes grow old. The most beautiful women develop wrinkles. Heroines die premature deaths from heroin. And the “I” can lose sight of itself thinking that the “I” simply is, without having to think about what the “I” should be.

The “I” establishes one set of hierarchies and the world another. The challenge, then, consists of understanding the point to which the order external to the “I” is acceptable and justifiable, and then, the point to which the “I” is able to accept, change, reorder the world. The mystic can do this, anew, from Pascal’s chair. As for the rest of humanity, forced to go out into the world, we also find ourselves obliged to reflect upon our relationship with all that is outside of ourselves. I think I know myself because I live inside my own skin (“full of myself, laid siege by my own epidermis”—Gorostiza), but when I emerge from myself, I feel that I do not know, or perhaps I un-know myself because I experience the feeling that the world does not know me. How can I come to know the world without losing my knowledge of myself? How can I enrich the world and still enrich myself at the same time? To emerge from the self is to transform the self; it means discovering some “other” that has always lived within us. Love, friendship, experience. Naturally, the categories contained in this volume, in effect, explain how one travels from the “I” to the real person, and from the real person to the world, to others, to society.

The road is not an easy one. Without falling into egomania, we sometimes find we experience moments in which we are struck by the strong feeling that the more alone and isolated we are, the closer we feel to those things that belong to everyone but which we feel are exclusively ours. The word, the dream, the recollection, the desire, the sun, the beach we ran across bare-foot. . do these things belong only to us? Or is it that by belonging so profoundly to us, they actually belong to everyone? The primary “I” can feel that it reigns over a world invisible to everyone but itself.

The “I” can also experience a kind of satisfaction that consists of knowing oneself to be different from everyone else and even alien to a given moment. But that same quality of the “I” only exists because it is visited by something outside of the “I.” We can celebrate our original plasticity, the illusion of a solitude that identifies itself with the very first creation. The world does not enslave us. We are different from the truths that are received and the virtues that are consecrated. The young soul does not shrink before his singularity, which is his freedom. The “I” perceives this to be his most stellar moment. But the “I” that remains too long in this glorious instant of youth runs the risk of beginning with self-definition only to end up in self-defense, of denying the enrichment of the “I” by allowing the undesirable and unpredictable to invade it and youthful courage to turn into immature fear, of finding itself, in the end, old and destroyed by those things that we all loved when we were young. .

Sooner rather than later, the “I” must learn that it can be its own worst enemy. That our personal mirror can be our most vexing ghost. And that, in the end, as Mexican novelist Salvador Elizondo warns us, a person can be his own worst disguise. Youth can be a terrible pleonasm when a person lacks the valor to be himself, expose himself to failure, not knowing if the door opens to a free fall. Nevertheless, even those of us, like myself, who have already reached the age of wills and testaments, treasure those moments of youth that continue to sustain our “I” throughout the years. We would do well to stop for a moment and ask ourselves, what is it that sustains my “I?” What is it that always remains with me? Paradoxically, the answer is almost always found in things that we received from outside ourselves, those sacred moments of love, friendship, and creativity that we shared with others.

The “I” believes in pleasure, laughter, good food, sex. The “I” believes in itself, sometimes feeling proud of itself and sometimes ashamed. After all, who doesn’t bear the blemish of shame, the faux pas, the lost opportunity, the mere memory of which can cure us of that dangerous hubris which leads us to think of ourselves, in Mexican terms, as the mero mero, the cat’s meow, the king of the forest, the bee’s knees?

Kierkegaard said that he was never able to forget himself, not even while sleeping. “I can abstract myself from everything but myself.” Defect? Virtue? Or, based on its philosophical manifestation, is this an invitation to transcend the “I,” to empower it, to cultivate it so that it may grow and be valued in contact with others? And the “others” are not to be taken lightly. The “I” can only achieve plenitude when it leaves itself and creates its own life while still inhabiting it. The “I” that lives in the world is somewhat like people who live in a house that is still under construction. And the work never ends. With luck, we manage to give it a shared value. My subjectivity, my “I,” only gains meaning if it is linked to the objectivity of the world outside of my “I” and to which I connect through a collective subjectivity that we call civilization, society, culture, work.

But once there, in the center of that star that grants us such feelings of plenitude — me, the world and my subjectivity enriched by the society and the culture that my work enriches — we all gaze, once again, into the mirror of the “I,” we gaze upon our wounded vanity, the detestable egotism, the things we most hate in others that we see reflected back in our own image, and we feel guilty if we close our eyes. Wouldn’t we love to replace the Socratic mandate with an adamant “ignore oneself,” and then we open our eyes once again and look at ourselves in the mirror, naked, and in the end we recognize the things that most desperately identify us, each one in solitude and each one in communion with our brothers.

It is a bitter host. It has no answer. We don’t know what the body is. We don’t know what the soul is. And nothing identifies us more than the fact that we don’t know what we are. As St. Augustine said, “Man cannot understand the manner in which the body and the soul are united and yet, that is precisely what man is.”