According to Daniel Heller-Roazen, “the earliest surviving alphabetic texts of classical Antiquity consist not of literary works or economic inscriptions . . . but of graffiti and funeral inscriptions commemorating and recalling the dead.” For example he notes that “on a Theban object from the eighth century B.C., for instance, one finds an inscription that reads, ‘I am the kylix of Korakos’; and on memorials from the same period, one encounters such phrases as ‘Eumares built me as a monument,’ or, more striking still, ‘I am the commemoration (μνῆμα) of Glaukos.’”
The history of saying I might be far different than typically we assume. So easy to think the first-person pronoun refers to the livingness of the life of which it speaks, but maybe not. Saying I, more properly heard, isn’t heard at all. It’s found carved on a stone, or on the pedestal of the image that points in its odd way at the life that has gone missing below the ground. Μνῆμα meaning “a memorial, remembrance, memory” and “a mound or building in honor of the dead” relates to μνῆμα, difference being only in the stress the first vowel carries, meaning “memory as a power of the mind.” Memory must bear within it the fact of what yet hasn’t happened, it remembers while living that it has already died, and so works as an oracle works—by looking behind, it predicts the future. In saying I we speak from within the grave; or is it the grave speaks for us, because we cannot speak for ourselves, even as the words are coming out of our mouths, somehow it is not we who are saying them.
Heller-Roazen goes on to mention the etymology for I proposed by Karl Brugmann: “the Greek term ego, as well as its Indo-European relations, derives from a neuter noun (*eg[h]om), meaning simply ‘here-ness.’” No claim of an inner life in saying I, the word functions originally in claiming not a place for the self, but in claiming the self as a place.
Who am I? I am who is here.
The grave can speak it just as well as I can. The stone says I am the memory of myself. But the memory lives so much longer than the life. It points at what is departing, a kind of elsewhere that I am, an elsewhere that is me. I live it so I cannot see it.
Witnesslessness.
For a long time as a child I thought of the Quick Cemetery without reflecting on it. Later it seemed a kind of joke—cemetery filled not with the dead, but the living. But now I see there is no truer name for a cemetery. It is there where whatever living is goes on past the lives that lived it. There in the ground where memory builds her house, and the letter I points down at the ground and at the same time gives this gentle advice to look up at the passing clouds.
In the Paleolithic Age humans begin the work of representation. What they hunt and what hunts them, bird-headed shamans, mastodons, bulls, horses, all appear, and often with great subtlety of form, on the walls of the caves. I like to think they painted the images in the mind that only later we’d find to be our own. There is little evidence that the men and women who made these images lived in the caves where they painted. Life seemed to happen elsewhere. The images lived in the cave alone.
More than the animals, more than the occasional geometric pattern, what fascinates me most are the portraits of humans themselves. The portraits aren’t of faces.
Lovely when the anonymous reveals itself as the intimate, when identity isn’t a marker of unique self, but the self that here occurred. Not the recognition of a face, but the fact of a hand.
More moving still, these hands weren’t painted onto the rock. Mixing ochre or soot with water and putting it in the mouth, the artist put his hand on the stone and spat out the ink that would mark his presence not by painting it in, but by leaving it absent.
The hand that made this silhouette has gone missing, and only its absence remains. It exists by showing forth its own being forgotten, ghost-figure pointing back at the body that made it, its own absence most profound predictor of each human’s common fate, that against all time for most of it we have been missing.
Might it be true to say that the hand is a truer portrait of humanity than the face could ever be? That I grope my way toward being long before I open my eyes to the light in it? That the face can only stare out at the one approaching and through the nakedness of its own gaze say, Thou Shalt Not Kill, knowing all the while that being killed is what happens to a face, by other hands, or by one’s own, or by the hand of time.
Or it’s simpler, less violent, less dark. To be human is to be a made-thing, and the hand is the tool of our making.
I mean to say I cannot see my own face.
But I can see my hand.
Maybe that’s the first thought.
This hand I’m holding in front of me is me. Impossible to tell by looking at the images of the hands in the caves if they were held palm out or palm against the rock.
I’d like to say palm out.
Then the palm is the first mirror. It goes missing when you make a fist or when you die. To paint it is to make it go missing before you go missing yourself. I can’t tell if it offers a welcome or a warning, greeting of the upheld hand or command to stop, if it says stay back, back from this rock wall; or if it says the opposite, come, come, walk into the stone and find out how there to make your next home.
William Wordsworth, in another effort at portraiture of the human, questions: “I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet?” In ancient Greek, poet comes from the verb “to make, to do.” Word of the hand more than the mouth. The poet is a hand that acts like a face: it speaks, it thinks. He goes on:
He has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves:—whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.
Deep in the riddle the poet lives, where absence is present and presence grows absent.
Maybe it’s like holding water or sand in cupped hands; maybe it’s like holding ink in the mouth, wondering whether to swallow or to spit it out.
Wondering why my mind keeps turning back to ancient history when all I want to do is dwell here in my life. I guess I don’t know what my life is, don’t know what the horizon is. In every direction that border-line retreats with every step I take. But step isn’t a true word. I’m not moving at all. Just quiet in a chair, thinking silently to myself. Is that life.
I might say life is what persists through time. It has a duration, and to become an adult is to feel that duration as something both growing longer and diminishing, growing heavier and turning daily into almost nothing. It’s like a word in a sentence grown aware of itself, hearing faintly the echo of those words already said and dimly perceiving that more words are to come, single part of the meaning no single word can hold, just as a day is made possible only by all the days already lived, and this day will drift away into those to come which would not exist without this one, and these moments that seem to be the ones in which we live abandon themselves before we realize we too have been left almost behind.
But I might say other things. Or life might speak better for itself.
It’s hard to keep up; memory keeps looking backward.