The Plural of Self

The plural of self is selves, and if elf, elves; a shelf grows into shelves. And yet, here we are, not really knowing which is self and what is selves.

The fact is that there is no such thing as self; self is an image in the real that is ideal in the way it exists — no evidence can proof or prove the self, but yet it is hard not to think of self. Self, it turns out, emerges from the cocoon of reality and takes flight, and metamorphosis ensures it never remains the same.

Some people think of self as identity, or of self as being. It is possible to see the two things as the two sides of self, bearing in mind that you cannot be immutable being if you are to have identity.

Why? Because identity is defined in terms of what you are not; if thing X and thing Y are distinct, then X cannot be Y. But if things that are not X are always changing, how is X defined in terms of things that are not X? X must change too, and so it is never an identity in the ideal sense. It is a shifting panorama, a landscape, a kaleidoscope of identities, conflated as self.

And so, I am selves. I am many. If I, Christian, am in the image of God, remember too that God can be many, for in Genesis he is not only God (singular) but Elohim (plural).

The Identifiction of Identification

The dusty sunlight made everything slow. We leaned, wearily enervated, against whatever walls we could. And we decided that not being women, we would never be able to understand them1; that not being Hindus, we would never be able to understand them2; that not being physicists, we would never be able to understand them3; and so on.

In fact, not having perfect labels, nor faces, we would never be able to understand everything. Or so they (1, 2, 3, ..., n) told us.

World Class

Today was not such a lousy day, but there was something lacking. Somehow, the whole day ticked by mechanically, almost like the huge mechanical clocks in German town squares where tin soldiers raise and lower their weapons on the hour, every hour. There is no real fire where I am. Only small sultry and indignant embers (or members) with a few sparks.

Have we gone wrong? Do we no longer dare to innovate with large visions? Keep it simple, stupid. Keep it down. Do not stick your neck out. Why do you think you are special? Why do you want to rock the boat? It's no point going ahead when nobody can keep up. I've heard all these things. And this is why the good is the enemy of the great. We're good. Sometimes, very good. But we're still amateurs with tiny dreams; the larger dreams are whittled down to size so that we can swallow them – which means that we never grow to meet the challenge unless we already know we can.

It's not that we haven't dreamt large before. We have dreamt big dreams. It's just that we've never dreamt world-class dreams. What's world-class? Being able to attract talent that is world-class. Being able to accept that world-class excellence is not national-level excellence, but something that is a totally different breed of animal.

We need to learn from the world. If you want to be world-class, you must see the world as your class. You need to sift through the silly and inane papers at cut-rate conferences and find the one major discovery. You need to realise that if people working on your national curriculum are starting to discover valuable gems, your rejection of such gems might be a mistake – and if not a mistake, at least know why you made your choice.

This is what a little island with a lot of money might become if it is not very perceptive, very careful, very encouraging of big dreams. It can become a Yahoo-land where inane and silly ideas are given space and time, and the whole shebang is called 'a balanced perspective'.

We can still be great. We need to remember why we want to be great. To be great, we have to be of service, of deepest usefulness to others, taking little for ourselves except that which is needed for institutional life. Then come the blessings of time and space, faith and grace – perhaps not really in our time, but some day. And when sic transit gloria mundi, we will at least have done our part to ensure that the glory has passed to the heirs who deserve it.

Today, the brightest spot was seeing god-daughter walking around like a normal human being. That was my first thought. Then I realised that it was a silly thing to think. She is a normal human being. It's the rest of us who are odd. Five hours later, I realised yet another thing. We're all odd, all peculiar. She's just more sensible than many.

Word of the Day: Autochthon

This is an interesting word. It is guaranteed to cause fits to Hangman players and players of other games who are taken unawares. Such players, trawling for vowels, will go through A, E and I before discovering the paucity thereof; on going doggedly onwards to O and U, they will find a rather unsettling distribution in the second part. What four consonants could those be, between the two Os?

But lexically, autochthon comes from the Greek auton, 'a thing itself' and chthonios, 'of the earth'. It denotes an entity which comes from where it is found. What? That's it? Yes, well... the Latin equivalent is aborigine, which means 'from the origin(al place)'.

The opposite of 'Chthonian' is 'Olympian'; that is, Chthonian is to Olympian as Earth is to Air, or as plebeian is to aristocrat – or symbolically, as hammer is to thunderbolt. That, of course, resonates with symbols from many places and cultures. I leave you to think about such resonances on your own.