A human being is a dwelling constellation of contradictions, largely opaque to itself. “Inward secret creatures,” Iris Murdoch known as us in reckoning with the blind spots of our self-knowledge. “People are simply the form of organisms that interpret and modify their company by way of their conception of themselves,” thinker Amélie Rorty wrote as she examined what makes a person — a self-conception formed by our astonishing evolutionary inheritance, which took us from micro organism to the Benedictus in a mere minute on the clock-face of the cosmos; a self-conception distorted by an ego that habitually confuses who we want we had been for who we’re, redeemed solely by the courage to know ourselves.
A era after Maya Angelou captured these flickering contradictions in her poem “A Brave and Starling Truth,” which sailed into area to remind us that “we’re neither devils nor divines,” Jane Hirshfield cracks open this everlasting query of what it means to be an individual in a beautiful poem from her assortment The Asking: New and Selected Poems (public library).
TO BE A PERSON
by Jane HirshfieldTo be an individual is an untenable proposition.
Odd of proportion,
upright,
unbalanced of physique, feeling, and thoughts.Two predator’s eyes
face ahead,
but appear all the time to be attempting to look again.Unhooved, untaloned fingers
appear to understand largely grief and ache.
To create, too usually, largely grief and ache.Some take,
in witnessed struggling, pleasure.
Some make, of witnessed struggling, magnificence.On the opposite aspect —
a creature able to blushing,
who chooses to spin till dizzy,
likes what’s shiny,
calls for to remain awake even when sleepy.Learns what’s fundamental, what acid,
what are stomata, nuclei, jokes,
which birds are flightless.
Learns to play four-handed piano.
To play, when it’s wanted, one-handed piano.Hums. Feeds strays.
Says, “All collectively now, on three.”To be an individual could also be doable then, in spite of everything.
Or the query could also be thought-about nonetheless no less than open —
an unused drawer, a pair of ready workboots.
Complement with Sylvia Plath on the pillars of personhood and thinker Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jane Hirshfield’s fantastic poems “Optimism,” “The Weighing,” and “For What Binds Us,” and her uncommonly insightful prose meditation on how poetry transforms us.
