THE CHRONIC "I-NESS"

I was born on September 22, 1946. The plan was to name me Sharon, but out of my mama's mouth came the words, "Her name is Katherine, we'll call her Kay" and there you have it. I looked like a little Eskimo baby, no doubt from my mother's Assiniboine Indian features. My parents smiled at me. Their smiles and their frowns seemed to match up with my physical movements- or my physical movements - and later my oral abilities - seemed to match up with my parents' smiles and frowns...and before you knew it, or before I knew it,....another little "I" had been created. A being who was aware of herself. A cooing, yelling, smiling, pooping, peeing, little "I". Why was I not born a panda bear? Or an owl? Or a whale? Or Helen Mirren, who is pretty much my same age? They are "I"'s, too. Even a bug or a bee might be an "I", who knows, although I am stretching it here, because one requires a certain type of awareness to become an "I" and I do not think a bee is capable of such awareness. Anyway, it is this belief, this notion, that each of us is "I" that interests me today, largely because yesterday afternoon I met with the Seattle astronemer who always gets me thinking.and appreciating her for her language.

"All I have to do is anything I want," she said.

"Our house looks like me but it acts like him," she says.

"When I was a young girl I had a brief affair with my parents' stero."
And: "I, I, I. The concept literally paralyzes me. I can not seem to get away from it, this minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour "I"!"

So mostly yesterday we talked about the Everlasting "I". Everlasting, of course, until the Dreaded End, at which we both alternately shudder and wink. Awareness. How we want less of it! All this awareness, self-awareness, other-awareness, roiling around our minds, our mind's eyes, our bellies, everywhere, it crops up everywhere! The door slams. It is as if our entire Life is an "I". I slammed the door. My father cried. I made my father cried. I am lucky. Or I am always unlucky. By five years old I was performing for the eyes of other people, as if that would make my own "I" more important, sturdier, shinier. "Shiney" is the astronomer's word.

It is Zen, of course, which wants to nudge us, slam us, carry us away and out of all this "I" stuff. Get rid of it, for Buddha's Sake! As children we try to get rid of our own "I" by copying others. "I would rather have HER "I" than my own "I"," we say to ourselves, or we sort of say to ourselves. I will shave my legs like SHE does. I will drink coffee out of a mug. I will say my prayers, pretend that I love daisies, which I really hate. Because she is more beautiful than me. Because if I am as beautiful as SHE is, perhaps I won't have to worry so much about this "I" of mine.

We have children. Our smiles and frowns are attached to our babie's physicality, to their noises, to the stuff inside their diapers, to their smooth, perfect flesh. Sometimes our children seem to expand our "I"s. I listen to your breathing, I watch you when you are looking and when you are not looking and I swell with love and pride. My love and my pride, they swelleth because of you and now my "I" is larger than ever before. "I" am still I, but I also become "you". In a way. In a little bit of a way.

"Oh, I am so TIRED of my self-awareness!" calls out my astronemor. "I am so TIRED of this chronic "I"-ness I carry along as if it is a shoe glued inside it's own shoebox!"

Me too, I think. Me too. Six years ago I stopped writing in my journals because I could no longer bear this notion of the "I". It tired me, it wore me out, it wore me down. Later, when Jim died, I lost my sense of "I" for awhile and I thought, "My God, is THIS what it takes? Must somebody DIE before I can let go of myself?" But of course I couldn't let go of myself at all. I didn't yet understand grief. I wanted to extricate myself from my own life but I didn't know how and besides, I didn't really want to. I just didn't want to be ME anymore. That's all. That's normal.

"I, I, I." Do you remember those sentences from Saul Bellow's HENDERSON THE RAIN KING? "I, I, I". The book is, in party, a study on how much we Americans carry around our own concepts of the "I", how we carry them and dance with them and eat with them and have sex with them and BELIEVE in them. 'How important am I!" It is not a useful notion. Not at all.

I know there are more sophisticated ways of thinking and talking about this. I've read the books. I could name some authors. But today I just want to write from my own semi-uninformed self, my own LITTLE "i", I guess.

I suppose.
I think.
I believe.
I know.