The First Person Singular

8. I am a...

37 8 I am a . . . When we speak about things, they become clearer; they break apart or connect up differently; words may well make things and situations first appear. Words also present the speaker. “Here I am!” “I saw, I heard, I did . . .” “I say, I tell you . . .” The “I” presents the speaker and maintains him or her present. Linguistics has labeled the word “I” an empty “shifter”; it designates the one who is now uttering this phrase and in the course of a conversation it designates first this person, then that person, then that other person. Literary critics have pointed out that the word “I” in a text can designate the author of that text, or the narrator in a novel who puts himself forth as having seen these events or lived through them, or a fictitious speaker to whom the author has ascribed certain states of mind and actions. What I ascribe to the word “I” when I use it can be the same as what anyone else ascribes to it: “She is the thirteenth on the wait list for that flight.” “I am the thirteenth in line for that flight.” But there are instances where the word “I” has a special force. “I am on my own now.” “I am a mother.” When, alone or in the presence of others, she says “I,” she impresses it upon herself, and her substance retains it. With these words, she takes a stand and faces ahead. The next time she says “I,” this subsequent “I” corresponds to and answers for the prior one. “I got mad when my petition was just ignored . . .” “I am so happy I quit my job.” With these words, the present I puts the past I in the present I. The I that quit or that got mad is the I that is now speaking. The power to fix my own word on myself is a power that leaps over the succession of hours and days to determine the future now. One day, deep in the secrecy of my heart, I said, “I am a dancer,” and it is because and only because I uttered those words that I am now on the way to becoming a dancer. Already to say “I am a man” is to commit myself to manly behavior; to say “I am a woman” is to commit myself to womanly deeds. To say “I am young still” is to put my forces outside the roles and role models set up about me. The remembering of these words that we implant in ourselves is made possible by brushing off the thousands of impressions that crowd on our sensory surfaces as we move through the thick of the world. The 38 T H E F I R S T P E R S O N S I N G U L A R I arises in an awakening, out of the drowsy murmur of sensations. It especially requires an active forgetting of lapses, failures, and chagrins— which persist as cloying sensations that mire our view, occluding the past and the path ahead. There is a fundamental innocence in the I, which stands in the now and from this clearing turns to the time ahead and the time passed. To say “I” is to commence. “Now I see!” “I will go!” There is youth and adventure in the voice that says “I.” “Now I see!” These words, once I fixed them in myself, leave me free to observe the passing scene without tentatively arranging it around one center and then around another. “I will go” leaves me free for whatever interruptions, distractions, and momentary amusements the day brings. Through innumerable interruptions, contraventions, invitations, and lures to do other things, I feel the uncanny power of these words that is the sole evidence that they will prevail. “Now I see!” “I am still young.” To utter “I” is to pledge to honor those words. Nobility characterizes, in someone of high station or of low, the man who is as good as his word, the woman whose word is a guarantee. Servile is he whose words are not his own, she who is not in her actions. Our word “I,” “I say . . . ,” “I am going to . . . ,” “I am a . . .” is the first and fundamental way we honor ourselves. Saying “I am a dancer,” I will seek out dance classes, I will train every day with exclusive resolve, I will endure being left out of company selections, dancing...