Response to ‘The Working Self’
Martin Conway

Images of the self exist in every memory. The analogy between memories and a hologram is a good one, although what is seen through the shards of mental glass that are memories is not only something from the past but also something from the present. The rememberer exists now and the memory is constructed from different fragments glued together by more abstract knowledge of one’s life, reflecting a self that is past and a self that you may or may not like to meet again. Discrepancies between what we were then, what we are now, and what we may become drive our use of memory, a use that often lies outside conscious control- which is why a poem can surprise us with what it makes us feel and what memories those feelings may be based on.

But poetry, other types of art, and indeed everyday experiences, can only be emotionally responded to and brought together with our past when memory and the self are not too discrepant. Consider a young man with the narcissistic delusion that he is a famous rock guitarist. A belief he holds even though he knows he cannot play a guitar. He is deluded because although in some sense he knows his belief is ‘wrong’, that it is contradicted by his memory, for him memory no longer carries the weight it once did in anchoring the self in reality, in a remembered reality. Consider too the patient with brain damage to the frontal lobes who confabulates a past consisting of fragments of memories but now configured or “glued together” in ways wholly incorrect. The confabulations of such patients are sometimes referred to as “honest lies”, they are not delusions but rather attempts to make sense of reality after one’s ability to manipulate knowledge into self-coherent forms has failed.

Extreme cases? Maybe. W.N. Herbert’s poem catches neatly the idea of discrepancy, the idea of all the selves we’re not and all the selves we are. Memory is the database of what we call the “working self”: a repository of currently active goals, models of the self, and beliefs about ourselves, what we are, what we want to be, and we ought to be. The working self and knowledge of that past are locked together in a dynamic embrace that when broken, in pathology, brain damage, and dementia, releases a self set free from the past. But when the self is not anchored in the past there is no tangible future, the goal structure falls apart, and the discrepancies between the different domains of the working self dissipate. When memory is negated, when it becomes “is not” rather than “is”, the self can be anything .