The way we are, nonchalantly, as we get to know the world... We pick something up with a hand, look at something, notice something, grasp something. The body that is “I” acts. We learn of the world through the subject “I” and take action on it. This model of perception is premised on the model that “I” will integrate that I. Isn’t this way of thinking already outdated when it comes to understanding actual humans?
In even my earliest memories, my body had a tendency to be unwieldy. My hands, especially, acted on their own against my wishes. Sometimes I had to frantically stop them from hitting my cheeks, as if I were in some comedy routine.
The idea that the subject of an action was singular didn’t match my reality. I always heard all sorts of voices.
We have seen a human’s personality as the self, but we haven’t thought that the self contains multiple personalities. If it came to light that I had multiple personalities, I probably would have been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and relocated to an appropriate position in society.
Ten some years ago I met a practitioner of Chinese medicine. Following traditional etiquette, he lit a stick of incense. There were windows in the room, but they were closed.
There was no wind blowing. The flame on the incense suddenly went out. “That doesn’t happen very often,” he murmured, and rolled two semicircular dice with yin and yang written on them in seal script. He wouldn’t treat me unless he got the yin yang on an odd roll. It came up the first time.
After examining my tongue, he examined my eyes. Pressing down on my bottom eyelid, he told me to look into his eyes.
“Ahh. It’s a wonder you didn’t go crazy. There are thirteen of you. I heard you do martial arts; you mustn’t quit. If you do, you’ll go mad.”
To someone who thinks the present world perfectly reflects reality, that must sound like a trickster’s gibberish. But it made an awful lot of sense to me.
Because I was never able to think of myself as singular. What I’ve always experienced is multiple selves not integrated by a conscious “I”; incapable of taking consistent action, I constantly find myself in contradiction with this world called reality.
I always exist as something that is not “I”—unwieldy, disorganized, and scattered. That’s my normal.
When you think about it, hair, nails, organs, and limbs grow at different speeds. They probably all think different things too. They must all have their own languages, and there’s no way those languages can be understood via consciousness.
If we call lending an ear to those voices that aren’t voices “mental illness,” then we have a concept of the subject of the body that is “I,” and the voices as an objective other. But maybe the “mental illness” labeling is merely a product of only seeing these things as a deviation from integration.
Translated by Emily Balistrieri
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