The here, now is a first-person, singular experience. This is a stereotypical Zen-like statement, either completely pretentious or quite powerful according to how you read it, or how you like to read it.
First-person, singular is like this: “I, Pedro, am sitting at a café in Paris, watching and listening to the happy crowd having Sunday brunch. I, Pedro, had a tasty coffee, and I, Pedro, am now drafting a blog post.”
Second-person, singular is like this: “You, reader, should take a shower sooner rather than later.”
Third-person, singular is like this: “She left me, the odious witch.”
First-person, plural is like this: “We cooked dinner. We burned the house down.”
Second-person, plural is like this: “You all should take a shower, all of you, without exception, all of you.”
Third-person, plural is like this: “They left me, the odious witches.”
I think that it’s important to know the difference between these persons or perspectives, and to know when you’re having a first-person, singular experience with its wealth of sensations and emotions, and when you’re leaking out of first-person and trying to be in the mind or body or heart or soul of someone else. “You, reader, should see a shrink.” It doesn’t sound right, does it?
I can have my first-person, singular experience of the world: Paris, café, piano, cello, breakfast, dinner, my own thoughts and feelings, my own sensations, my own agency—which I’ll define as “making choices and decisions on my own behalf according to my own goals, short-term and long-term.”
Or I can experience the world by proxy: someone sitting not far from me is having a croissant with his coffee, and in my imagination I start tasting that croissant, chewing it, swallowing it, loving it by proxy because it’s someone else’s experience and sensation but I try to make it my own. Eat a croissant by proxy: weight-loss strategy.
Five hundred years ago, a great painter (who happened to be a white male, but I think this isn’t too important) had a first-person, singular experience while in the presence of a woman (also white, but it’s just a detail). It’s not possible for us to know exactly how the painter was feeling, but we can suppose that he was, indeed, having thoughts, sensations, and emotions of many types, reacting to the woman, to the environment in which they were together, to the entire sociocultural context in which the man and the woman lived.
The man and the woman engaged in a deeply meaningful give-and-take. Every time the man took a breath he’d capture some molecules emanating from the woman, and vice versa. He saw the woman, he heard her, he talked to her. And she saw him, heard him, talked to him. A real molecule dialogue, in real time, analogical. Carl Jung would say—wouldn’t he?—that the man was meeting his anima, and the woman meeting her animus. In other words, an archetypal experience of infinite power. Having sex isn’t necessary for this archetypal encounter, and it’s extremely unlikely that Leonardo da Vinci had sex with Lisa del Giocondo.
But he did paint her, creating a record of their two-sided first-person, singular archetypal encounter (“ihre zweiseitige, singuläre archetypische Begegnung in der Ich-Perspektive”). You’re familiar with the painting, now called “Mona Lisa” and hanging in the Louvre in Paris.
The painting traveled in time and space, and it accrued (or gathered) tremendous historical power. It’d be easy to hyperlink from the Mona Lisa to just about any event in European history: Renaissance, Napoleon, monarchy, empire, republic, the French, the Italians, nobility, war and peace. Or any event in art history. Or anything, anywhere.
Never mind history, anything, anywhere. I’m in the Louvre, in relative proximity to the painting. The painting is protected by glass, and I can’t get any nearer to it than about two meters or so. And I’m surrounded by dozens and hundreds and thousands of tourists from every corner of the world, all of them having waited in a crowded line to stand for fifteen seconds two meters away from a painting protected by glass, and all of them taking selfies with their smartphones. And I too will take a selfie, standing in the crowd; and I’ll publish the photo on Instagram; and I’ll take a screenshot of my Instagram and publish it here.
And you’ll look at a reproduction of a snapshot of an Instagram feed featuring someone else’s selfie near a glass-protected painting that is the record of a long-ago archetypal meeting between anima and animus.
Proxy, proxy, proxy, proxy, proxy to the nth power.
The experience of belonging to a crowd of smart-phonies is its own thing, its own archetypal experience. But it seems useful to make a distinction between that experience and the other: the two-sided first-person, singular & plural meeting of archetypal energies. I, Pedro, met a woman. We talked. Molecules came and went, molecules intertwined. The experience transformed me, “on a molecular level.” I, Pedro, went to the Louvre on a lark, just to do the thing that thousands and millions of tourists do, have done, and will continue to do. Miserable little pixel. Ant in the anthill. Bit, dot, ant, nit, wot, zit.
I, Pedro, take a deep breath and I write a sober, intelligent seven-item list. Very helpful, you-Pedro!
1. Learn your persons. First, second, third, singular and plural. Each offers you a perspective, a filter, a view, a possibility.
2. Monitor how you pass in and out of first-person singular. All persons are vitally useful in your life, but their usefulness suffers if you don’t know where you are, person-wise.
3. “By proxy” means not your own lived experience. It has its merits, too; movies and novels allow you to have terrific adventures by proxy.
4. But if you’re looking for deeply meaningful lived experiences, first-person singular is more or less obligatory. Two-sided first-person singular experience becomes first-person, plural. Obviously.
5. Not every wot and zit yielding a smartphone is a smart-phony. There are plenty of dumb-phonies out there.
6. Wouldn’t it be terrible if a supposed seven-item list only had SIX items?
6b. Or EIGHT. Geez.
