The Crowded Self

Have you ever asked yourself “Who Am I?” Probably not – or at least, not very often. Identity is one of the few things we are all pretty sure of. We may wonder WHAT we are, and WHY we are – but WHO we are is a question that hardly troubles us. After all, we each have a name and a face which are officially registered, and are recorded on various government documents, including, of course, drivers’ licenses, passports, and birth certificates. Then there are fingerprints and eye-scans, and all kinds of other proofs of our individual uniqueness.

But within this “self,” many authorities in the realm of Psychology have detected numerous personalities, which sometimes seem to be at war with each other. Creators of fictitious characters, from Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to The Three faces of Eve have had a jolly time exploring the idea of multiple Selves.

However, there is no need to go to literature to find some of the other You’s hidden inside you. For one thing, there’s the dimension of Memory. Whoever you remember being is also part of who you are, even if you consider yourself as no longer that person. But this introduces the much deeper dimension of Time. From the moment of birth – and actually some months before – you have been changing. Your life has been lived in segments, which are rather arbitrarily assigned such names as infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, middle age, and old age – and you are supposedly transitioning from one to the next, while being hardly aware of the changes. Time gives us a new and different self every day – or actually every second or nanosecond.

Shakespeare, in As You Like It, has human life divided into “Seven Ages,” in a speech that begins “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Shakespeare himself, of course, in addition to writing plays, was also an actor – so it would have been quite natural for him to think of life in theatrical terms. But why that particular number? Well, seven has always seemed to have magical qualities – hence the Seven Seas, Seven Wonders of the World, and the Seven Deadly Sins. But although he says “all the men and women,” his characters are all very masculine – from the “whining Schoolboy,” through the tumultuous Soldier and the Justice, to the very old Pantaloon. Women get scarcely a mention, except that the Lover is described as making a woeful ballad “to his mistress’ eyebrow.”

One of the nastiest poems I know decries the unpleasant truth that we are what not only Time but, more pertinently, our parents have made us – and what their parents made them. It is by Philip Larkin, who at one time was actually the British Poet Laureate, and is called “This Be The Verse.” There are only three stanzas – this is the last one:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

But, when I was a kid myself (before I didn’t have any), like most other kids I knew, I had a great interest in “Comic Books,” many of which featured so-called “Super Heroes,” who usually had dual identities. The trend was started by Superman, who came into existence when I was four years old. His super-powers are explained by the fact that he came, as a baby, from another planet. But they are disguised by his alternate identity as a journalist named Clark Kent.

There was another Super Hero named Captain Marvel, whom I actually preferred to Superman. His alter ego was a boy radio reporter named Billy Batson, who had discovered that he could acquire superpowers by uttering the magic word “SHAZAM.”

But, although, in sales, Captain Marvel had become the more popular, the reason people stopped hearing much about him was that – believe it or not – Captain Marvel was actually killed by Superman. It was all done quite legally. The publishers of Superman, DC comics, sued the publishers of Captain Marvel, Fawcett Comics, for copyright infringement, claiming the characters were too similar. They were indeed much alike in powers, costumes, and the dual identities. Superman won the case, and Captain Marvel disappeared from stores.

Very sad for his fans – because, as one of my own (copyrighted) epigrams put it:

I need my heroes
more than I need to know
the disillusioning truth about them.