Who Am I This Time?

A little over a month ago, in writing my friend Dana, I signed myself "Jason, Jeremiah, or Jonah ... which ever mythonym I'm using this week." In a backchannel e-mail, Elsie wrote: "Loved your poem...I replied in the voice of Colleen. I'm beginning to feel a little schizophrenic : )"

Folks who have done a bit of "click-through" research have probably figured out Elsie's given name by now. Yet, I persist in using this name I invented for her — originally with the motivation of protecting her identity. Again, if you click through to White Lace & Red Dirt, you'll learn that Elsie is a pastor at a church in a small Oklahoma town. As I say, anyone with a degree of dedication would have figured it out by now, so why do I persist?

If you brave the pop-up ads at The Saturn Sequence, you may have read my long poem "Still Life With Icons". The Rt. Rev. Dr. Omed has proclaimed it one of his favorites, and I will confess that it is one of mine as well. The poem includes an introduction and footnotes; what's quoted here is an edit:

Around the time I wrote this, I was very influenced by the work of Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer) and Jack Kerouac (On The Road).  Both men made fictions of their lives, to the point that they gave their friends fictitious names.   I was building a body of work which featured several of my friends, and I chose to create fictitious names which would remain constant throughout the body of work. So, if someone figures out who "Andrea" is, they'll know who I'm talking about every time I use that name. I had read Anne Charters' excellent biography of Kerouac which included a chart indicating which fictional names related to what real people (e.g., Dean Moriarty was the name Kerouac gave Neal Cassidy in On the Road). [Thus by using] the same fictional names throughout all the works ... once someone cracked the code, they'd only need a fairly simple chart.

The poem, in retrospect, seems to reflect a sort of mental breakdown. So, "making a fiction of my life" might be excused — some might even argue doing so caused the breakdown. But I'm better now. Really, I am. I mean, I can form complete sentences using words of multiple syllables and everything.

But I remain fascinated with the shifting nature of identity.

Here's how the very unreliable narrator of Neil Gaiman's story "Murder Mysteries" puts it:

Looking around today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel uncomfortable, as if I've received a gift unasked, from another person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation.   Nothing to do with me, I could say, innocently.   If it's true that every seven years each cell in your body dies, and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones. [Smoke and Mirrors p. 293, Harper Collins New York, 1998]

I think also, of famous folk who have renamed themselves — Samuel Clemens named himself "Mark Twain" and, according Justin Kaplan, ended his life portraying a character he created.

More recently, Robert Zimmerman renamed himself "Bob Dylan" (aprocryphally, after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas). His sense of identity is so fractured — or, perhaps he is so playful — that he has assumed a number of names throughout his life. "Blind Boy Grunt" has been "Alias" has been "Jack Frost", and most recently, "Jack Fate." This last is a name he assumes in the movie Masked and Anonymous; the reviews lead me to believe the movie has much to do with Mr. Zimmerman's current sense of his identity, and this myth of "Bob Dylan" which he thought he created in his youth — but has now taken on a life of its own.

All of this seems like notes for several essays. I shall return. Wearing the appropriate mask.