Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing

Two Consciousnesses

7 7 Two Consciousnesses A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame: so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-­presence in my mind That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being.1 I n these lines from The Prelude, Wordsworth explains the relationship between the remembered past and the active, creative present—that is, the life writing— as his experience of seeming to be “two consciousnesses ”: “Myself,” he writes, and “some other Being.” This “being” is basically a now-­ self seeking to define itself in relation to a then-­self that does not reallyexist (perhaps never did). When he thinks back on his former self, he is struck by the distance between himself now and what he thinks is his past. The “I” here consists of a double consciousness— onlyone that is identifiable as “myself.” The “other Being” is part memory, which, for Wordsworth, necessarily involves invention.Thewriting of The Prelude begins in thediscovery of the “two consciousnesses” of “Tintern Abbey”—the remembered (and, therefore, partly imagined) past self and the present self writing that past self onto paper, fixing it into form. Writing The Prelude Wordsworth more fully explores his senseof himselfand of his past selfas “someother Being.” The most original aspect of The Prelude is that the model of the epic and its traditional modes of adaptation and transmutation provide Wordsworth with a way of thinking about his own history and about how, as a writer, he is free to adapt his personal history and his poetic identity to suit his creative needs through the very act of writing. In effect, 8 Two Consciousnesses he becomes both the hero and the bard of his own epic, an odyssey of his own mind. But as a self-­ conscious literary performance, The Prelude is not so much a rumination on Wordsworth’s actual past as it is a poetics of memoir, a construction of memories, and a process of memorializing oneself and transforming the past into something that only exists now for a reader. The past does not exist: it is a fiction , it is cognitive material that the creative imagination may forge into something that does exist—the memoir, the lyric, the thinly-­ veiled autobiographical fiction, or even the personal epic. As an autobiographical epic (a pretty audacious enterprise ), The Prelude is a poem about what it means to write the self, to imagine a version of one’s life that is not strictly autobiographical but that serves other—one might even say, higher—literary purposes than confession or memoir. That is to say, Wordsworth’s poem is a narrative about the adaptation of memories of one’s past for the purposes of the writing moment in process, which is itself an activity of self-­ engendering and a fiction of authority that is meant to appear to the reader as if it is happening in concert with the reading of it. But the poem is also meant to be read and to be understood . And to be useful. After Wilde and then the Modernists , taking their cue from Keats’s resistance to “poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” we are today uncomfortable , disdainful even, of poetry that has the whiff of a didactic purpose.2 “Every great Poet is a Teacher,” Wordsworth insisted, “I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.”3 But he is not interested in teaching you how to be a poet—you have to figure that out for yourself. Instead, he wants to teach you how to have a poetic experience of life, how to make memories, not necessarily positive ones but darker ones too, into an ever-­ present source of spiritual —and moral—restoration. Wordsworth wants to show 9 Two Consciousnesses you how to make, to make memories, to make your life into story—to, in the words of Morrissey, sing your life. Wordsworth believed that his own practice has refined his imagination so that he can describe how the creative process of life works on him and how he can use it. Wordsworth’s life writing about his writing life shows that being creative means you neveractually become creative, as if that were the endpoint. You are always being creative and you never finish —even when you fail to produce—as long as your mind...